


redamancy

by velvetcrowbars



Category: Ensemble Stars! (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Ghost Drifting, Izumi is in denial, Leo is Leo, M/M, You know how this goes, it's a pacrim au folks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-27
Updated: 2017-04-05
Packaged: 2018-09-12 13:18:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 23,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9073570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/velvetcrowbars/pseuds/velvetcrowbars
Summary: The aliens invade on a Sunday; the Sunday after he and Leo sing together for the first time. The first time Leo writes a song about Izumi Sena.





	1. the land, the sea, and everything lost beneath

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Fallenfromfaith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fallenfromfaith/gifts).



> a Few Things: 
> 
> 1) i know little to nothing about pacrim tech and lore. to any hardcore fans out there, i'm so so sorry. 
> 
> 2) knights family is my Ultimate
> 
> 3) thanks so much to Princess who helped motivate me to finish this (and others for putting up w my incessant enstars screeching the past few months). 
> 
> 4) and finally, izuleo owns my soul, thank u for reading, i know this fic is a bit of a monster but please stick with us until the end ;-;

“Sena, do you believe in aliens?”

Leo’s hanging his head off the edge of Izumi’s bed, tapping bare feet against the wall to a song still trapped inside his head. Izumi peers at him from the corner of his eye, pencil gone still over a worksheet of half-finished English translations. Leo’s similar worksheet lays discarded and long forsaken on the floor.

“That’s-” his pencil lead breaks, one moment of pressure too long, “-where did that come from, idiot?”

He watches as Leo flips over onto his stomach, head resting in his hands, “It’s _important,_ okay? Scientists everywhere are counting on you.” He blows a puff of air at the bangs that fall against his forehead and it does something funny to Izumi’s stomach.

“...This is irrelevant.”

“Or-!” and Leo’s eyes are dew dropped mint leaves, suddenly wide. “What about werewolves? Or soulmates? True love? The end of the world? Vampires? Ah! Does that mean you think Rei and Rittsu aren’t real? Sena, that’s _terrible_!”

“You never make _any_ sense, I swear, and stop jumping to conclusions-” he starts but Leo’s already moving on.

“I believe in _allllll_ of them. Probably.”

“ _Probably?_ ”

Leo suddenly nabs his forlorn worksheet, scrutinizes it for a split second before flipping it over and promptly starts scribbling on the back. The song must’ve finally come to him. Izumi watches him while he has the chance, unobserved and unguarded, lingering on the slight furrow of his brow, the tiny tip of a candy pink tongue stuck out in concentration. When his eyes flicker up to Izumi’s it’s enough to make him jump.

“Hm?”

Izumi gets his wits back fast enough to shoot back, “Nothing. You’re just...leave me alone. You’re weird.”

“Hahaha! I don’t really want to hear that from _you_ , little Sena!”

He growls and stuffs his nose back into his homework, not thinking much of aliens or love or the apocalypse, forces his fingers to curl into the letters, once, then twice; _The soldier marches into battle, The soldier marches into battle._

\\\\\

Izumi has never liked the sea.

He goes only once, a family vacation a few summers before he joins the program. The memory leaves him with a sour tinge in his mouth, a twisty ache. Most of his time there’s spent under umbrella cover, a layer of sunscreen and thin long sleeves as extra protection, a command from his mother to stay under cover. It’s funny to think of it now; treating his body as some holy thing, something to be preserved in frames and glossy photo paper.

Their town is one of rivers, small streams and ponds and shallow, muddy rice fields. They spent hours under leafy tree cover, dipping in and out of tiny pools and silver fish springs with their white school socks in hand. Arashi complains, always, about her shirt or shorts being ruined when Leo smacks his palm too hard against the muddy water surface, sniffling against Izumi’s shoulder while Ritsu dozes on the sunbaked riverbank rocks. Tsukasa doesn’t join them until they’re almost out of grade school, puffing out his tiny chest to fill his big kid shoes, fingers permanently curled against Arashi’s sleeve for months before he can keep pace with the rest.

 _Knights_ : that’s what Leo starts to call them one day, picks up a twig and calls it a sword. They weave a wreath of weeds and call it a crown, Leo traces a heart and a bow on Izumi’s arm and calls it their coat of arms.

His childhood is a normal one, extraordinary in its commonality, nothing that he would take a second glance at if the world hadn’t begun to end without warning while in the middle of it.

The ocean is hot, roiling, unfathomable; far away from Leo’s matchstick smile, so brief and bright Izumi’s afraid he’ll miss it, away from Ritsu’s sleepy teasing, Arashi’s golden-colored kindness and Tsukasa’s wide, earnest eyes. It’s away from where he feels wanted, where he wants to belong. Because he’s prickly and bitter, and none of them seem to care about his emotional whiplash or sharp tongue. For Izumi that’s enough for the ocean to earn a rightful distaste.

He has a feeling the sea might swallow them whole, one day.

\\\\\

The aliens invade on a Sunday; the Sunday after he and Leo sing together for the first time. The first time Leo writes a song about Izumi Sena.

The first song that makes him wonder about the word _devotion,_ the pawing ache in his chest and the impulse under his skin when Leo smiles, all crooked, all his. It’s bittersweet and warm when Izumi hears his own voice nearly crack, Leo’s ridiculous, manic laughter, the scramble against the borrowed microphone and recorder. They’re lucky the school happened to have one in the first place, old and used as it may be. A relic from their parent’s high school days.

 _“This is stupid,”_ he wants to say, shove it in Leo’s face like an i-told-you-so, but the temptation to sing is too much to resist. His voice is rickety, stuck somewhere between childhood and adolescence but it works for their first song; awful and clunky as a beginning to anything might be.

“You’re _terrible_!” Leo shouts between uneven guitar strums, “Keep going!”

For him, Izumi does.

The breach busts through their childhood the day before Izumi’s turns fourteen. He watches it unfold clustered around their modest kitchen table, tiny television perched on the counter fading in and out of reception, the jumbled rushed voices of news reporters over the distinct noise of crumbling buildings.

It’s all very still, in their paper maché house with their breakable bodies, eerily quiet when his father trails in late from work saying the trains are all at a standstill, that there’s too many people trying to get away.

They have cousins in Tokyo. His mother calls seven times and no one picks up.

Leo climbs through his bedroom window late that night while the world sleeps fitfully, still only wearing his thin pajamas, acting on impulse when he ran through the four backyards that separate their homes and straight into Izumi’s lap. Izumi tosses his comfiest and cleanest sweatshirt at his face as soon as he notices the goosebumps down his arm.

“You’ll catch a cold if you keep this up, stupid,” he mutters, watching Leo quickly pull it over his head, practically bouncing with energy. His hair comes out static-y and Izumi fights the urge to comb it down with his fingers.

Leo smiles, disgustingly happy, “Why should I bother when I know you’ll keep me warm, Sena?”

It makes Izumi backpedal, only for a second, his retort more out of habit and practice than intention, “B-because it's _annoying_.”

“Aw, Sena, you’re stuttering!”

Izumi throws the nearest pillow with deadly accuracy into Leo’s laughing face. He falls dramatically onto his back, groaning and coughing, “A kill shot...and after how much _I loved you_...betrayal is so bittersweet-”

“I’ll kick you out, you know. This is _my_ house-”

“Hey, hey,” Leo shoots back up and wiggles closer into Izumi’s personal bubble, and he was pretty damn far into it to begin with. “Wanna hear our new song?”

Izumi glances between the gentle quirk of his mouth and glint of Leo’s eyes through the darkness; so much like summer green in the dead of winter. He knows he’s fighting a losing battle.

“Sure,” he mumbles, letting Leo nudge one bud into his ear and nestle into his side, their legs tangling together with the sheets and gentle blue of Izumi’s nightlight.

“By the way,” Leo whispers warm into his shoulder, “Happy birthday.”

\\\\\

Things get harder, after that.

There’s no benchmark shift, no Before or After to tab their life into sections with when the kaiju begin their assault on humanity. Everything continues, much as it had for as long as Izumi could care to remember; his parents go to work every day and while his ballet instructor takes a leave of absence even she comes back, eventually. Izumi still knows Leo’s room like his own and Arashi still falls asleep on his shoulder when a shoot goes too long. He still dislikes spicy things. Tsukasa still spouts English that none of them completely understand.

It borders on disconcerting, how the more things change the more they stay the same. Life rolls, ceaselessly forward, one stream of mundane everyday-ness punctuated with the occasional destruction of a major city, the death of 12,000 people on the coast of California.

But eventually they start to hear the rumors; of recruitment, of fifty ton towers of premium grade steel, of something called the “jaeger program”. The climate begins to change from hopeful despair into blurry optimism that they’re no longer sitting targets; that one day the warning sirens will go silent. It becomes all anybody can talk about soon enough, whispers skittering down the halls and excitement pressed between folded notes passed under desks.

By the time Sakuma Rei returns to his hometown that spring, the rumor is a full blown legend.

The first time Izumi see’s Ritsu’s older brother since middle school isn’t at the gate around the corner from his house but at their school assembly, placed carefully at the head of the stage with co-pilot Hakaze Kaoru in tow. Izumi gives Ritsu one hard look once they’re all seated, watches the way his fists tremble, fingers tied in knots around his sweater sleeves. He doesn’t know the whole story; it’s an obviously tender spot that even Izumi doesn’t push into for fear of getting his hand chopped off.

Rei’s been gone since they were first years, apparently without a single word to his dear little brother, not even so much as a goodbye. Izumi can’t say he _understands_ but, abandonment is a fear that looms low and steady in the back of his own mind, an anxiety he doesn’t dare touch.

The presentation is charismatic, convincing, the story of a path that only the brave and righteous-hearted may take. A worthy cause, the beginning of the end, a hero’s journey out on the Pacific against the odds. Kaoru smiles and half the room falls under his spell. Izumi, personally, thinks it’s all bullshit. Glory paintings are never as deep as they like to think they are.

Everyone’s buzzing with the excitement of it for weeks after, and Izumi watches Ritsu’s victim count pile up as the ones who ask him about Rei quickly learn _not_ to. Luckily there’s Mao, when Arashi and Leo aren’t around to fend off questions, Mao with the sun under his skin and _to-do_ lists scribbled on any blank space he can find. Izumi isn’t sure what to think of him.

Maybe some things have changed, after all.

\\\\\

“Sena.”

The school roof’s blustery today, pulls at their one-size-too-big clothes and Izumi almost doesn’t catch it when Leo throws his name against the breeze. It had become their new spot in the past few months but he’s starting to think the approach of winter might force them back inside before too long.

“Mm.” Izumi picks at his bento halfheartedly, splitting rice grains to give the illusion he’s eating instead of just playing with it.

Leo stares down at his half-eaten anpan like it holds a whole other universe, then shoves 3 bites worth at once into his mouth. Izumi tries not to laugh at the opposing forces, of Leo’s serious eyes and chipmunk cheeks. He’s still biting it back when Leo turns towards him, determination set in every inch of his pale and fine-lined face.

“Let's become pilots.”

Izumi does laugh now, lets it peel through the air until Leo growls and grabs his hand and grips it tight enough to maybe break a finger or two.

“Sena, listen to me.”

“ _Ow_? Let go, you-?”

“I’m _serious_ right now!”

“Fine, fine, but my poor _hand_ ,“

“We’re knights, aren’t we?” He’s closer now, pining Izumi in place with the mere hold of his gaze, splintering emerald and forest fire smoke. The wind ruffles his hair and Izumi swallows down the lump in his throat that might as well be his heart.

“It’s our duty.”

Izumi wants to counterattack; _we were kids, it’s impossible, that’s stupid, something might happen to you, we might never come back again_. The reasons all sit on the tip of his tongue, an arsenal, but-

Leo twines their fingers and stands up, dragging Izumi’s arm with him, hairpin smiles when he says, “I know it’s only a selfish king’s request. I _know_ that, but, please. Come with me.” He squeezes where their fingers interlock, and Leo’s no more than a 160 cm but suddenly he’s a tower, a strong rooted creature that makes Izumi _bend._ It’s all he can do to smile and bow in respectful defeat.

\\\\\

“You might die.” Izumi stares down his nose at Leo sprawled on his bedroom floor, looking entirely unconcerned with the composition sheets around his head and Izumi’s socked foot against his chest. They’ve had this conversation a million times over in the past few months, but the looming verge of graduation over them is an incentive to have it a million times plus one.

“That’s true,” his look is so very far away again and Izumi has to stop his mouth from twisting in frustration. Decent conversation is hard to have sometimes, when Leo starts to drift. Sometimes it’s like Leo looks straight through him, at some distant horizon that Izumi doesn’t have the capacity to see.

“I might die, but, y’know,” he drums his fingers over the matted floor, _tap tap tap tap_ , “I figured if I could die fighting monsters with you, then it might be worth it!”

\\\\\

They all go together, more or less. He and Leo apply at the same time, his sudden interest enough to grab Izumi by the chords of his conscious and tug him along, fairly willing. Arashi gets scouted by a recruitment officer in their last year of high school, and Ritsu’s already gone to the Shatterdome by then, tracing and smudging over his older brother’s footsteps to hero status in half the time. The only difference is, Izumi knows that bitterness drives Ritsu more than any promise of fame or good deeds done ever could.

Tsukasa trails behind them a year or two, tripping and dashing to keep up. Izumi lacks the empathy to pity him; even he isn’t that cruel.

But Tsukasa still sees them off at the train platform when they leave; him and Leo with a backpack and one spare bag, Arashi with half her wardrobe and the 2 suitcases to prove it. Her little brother hops from one to the other while her parents hug each of them goodbye, Leo’s parents following suit. It’s painfully obvious Tsukasa’s trying not to cry.

It’s strange, when he’s the only one with nothing to show. No picture worthy family presentation of affection. His parents had kissed him at the door, stood together as he shut the gate to his childhood home and set off down the sidewalk; he could be leaving for summer camp, or a club trip, or a new spring fashion spread across the cover of _Non-no_. It doesn’t feel any different to him, not yet, anyway.

Maybe it’s the same for his mother and father.

Ruka shows up barely in time, huffing and out of breath, school stocking slipping and wrinkling down her calves. The three small talisman clutched in her hand serve as an explanation, carefully meting out each into their outstretched palms when she asks for them.

“For good luck!” Is all she says, and Leo picks her up and squeezes so hard she squeaks. Arashi looks like she might cry right now, definitely will when they’re on the train. Izumi says a thank you, tries for confidence and reassurance when the tears prick at her eyes, the same vibrant hue of green.

Her brother’s eyes.

\\\\\

Arashi’s the first to leave them. It’s not surprising when they tow her off after a few days in the Shatterdome’s shelter, and she cries again, faintly and closed lip against Leo’s shoulder, dabs her smudging eyes with the sleeve of his shirt. Izumi hugs back, reluctant and prickly. They’ll see her soon enough, anyway; the world isn’t ending tomorrow and there’s no need to act as if it is.

The room assignments are random, but Izumi switches spots with a boy with steel glinted eyes and obsidian violet hair past his shoulder blades to be with Leo, per his request and Izumi’s compliance. There’s two beds in their room but Leo climbs into Izumi’s on the third night without a word, curls against Izumi’s back like it’s what they’ve always done. They don’t talk about it. Izumi doesn’t mind.

The lessons are all theories of chaos and worm holes and deep space time physics that he knows Leo tunes out after four sentences or less. It’s fine; he’s more than willing to listen enough for both if it means it’ll save their asses later. Luckily the classroom and chalkboards don’t last long; what their brains are capable of is only a prerequisite for what really matters – what their bodies can do.

Nito Nazuna is 160 centimeters of swift kicks to the shin and _anger_ , staff an extension of his slim arms that seem to reach to high heaven. He sends them all face first into a mouthful of mat at least once before they finally get to pair off on their own, nursing their bruising shins and bruised pride all the same. It’s a rite of passage, to survive Nazuna’s kwoon room.

They’re paired in rotations and six turns later, a few freshly blooming red scrapes and sheen of sweat finds them face to face.

“How-“ he thrusts the wooden metered staff forward, down, away, the crack of it splitting against his ears, “How are you-“ Leo jabs and lunges sideways, skims the side of Izumi’s ribs, burning, “-so good at this?”

“It’s like…” the tip of his tongue peeks out in concentration and he lands a solid blow against Izumi’s thigh in his split second of distraction.

“It’s like writing music with your body!” Leo manages, swinging a strike aimed for Izumi’s knees almost too quick to dodge. _Almost_.

 _well doesn’t that just fucking beat all_ he thinks, skidding back on his heels and rushing Leo again and again until neither of them can catch their breath.

\\\\\

“You’ve been approved,” is what Hasumi Keito says to them when they’re called up to the main control room late one afternoon, after another whole day spent nearly beating each other to death. Leo’s rocking back and forth on his toes, as if he has a premonition, waiting to preemptively jump with excitement. Even after Nazuna’s careful observations and critiques, skin sticky with exertion and clothes clinging to their sides, Leo’s still a loaded gun, ready to fire, red-hot where he grabs Izumi’s hand and squeezes behind their backs.

“We would like to test your compatibility.”

\\\\\

Leo’s mind in the drift is about as predictable as it is outside of it.

At first it’s invasive, stifling even, after the first initial shock of mind melding passes over. Like stepping into a pair of shoes that don’t fit quite right, being inside another person’s head is an adjustment, and Izumi finds himself stock still while Leo fills in all the space around him, blots out the stars and makes them a new sky. He’s always been better at that; creating and building, songs and doodles and Izumi’s expectations alike.

It takes a few seconds, or maybe minutes or hours. Time doesn’t matter in the drift, but eventually Izumi realizes that Leo’s going through the exact same thing: drowning in Izumi’s tendrils of memory and thoughts and emotions. They’re parallel sinking ships, breaking out and over the surface for air only to breathe in more of other, foreign feelings.

Izumi can’t see Leo, not in the physical sense. He can’t reach out and run his fingertips across his cheek but he can follow the idea of him, a thread that links them together. _it’s ok, it’s just me, don’t worry, you know me. and i know you. trust me._ Leo’s everywhere and nowhere and Izumi gropes blindly in the dark, searching for anything to latch onto. _i trust you_.

_do you trust me, sena?_

When he opens his eyes it’s into green and cerulean, a patchwork of soul and mind and body to make a single whole. Leo’s so bright when he tilts his head and stares Izumi square in the face, breathing synchronized and he looks so _sure_ , so _certain_ , _this is right, it’s not a mistake_. His heart pounds a strange percussion symphony, hurts when he lifts to meet Leo where he is, neural handshake coursing between them.

_i trust you._

\\\\\

It’s early one morning when a quick succession of knocks comes at their door and jolts Izumi awake from where he’d fallen asleep stretching on the floor. Leo jumps out of the bathroom almost immediately, still only half dressed and Izumi’s about to yell _put pants on at least_ when he swings the door open to reveal Itsuki Shu. Needless to say, it’s the last person either of them might’ve expected to see that early, let alone on the Ranger’s side of the dorms.

Leo leans against the doorframe, tilting his head. Shu looks like he’d rather be anywhere else besides standing outside their door.

“Kiryu wants to see you.” He folds his arms, expression already turning more distasteful by the second.

Leo must be in a good mood because he hums, teasing, “Oooh. What for?” and Izumi vaguely wants to smack him upside the head but the stretch in his thigh muscles is too good to pass up.

“Do not ask me, you fool. I am only to escort you to him.” His speech is stiff, speaks of hardback raising coupled with a type-A personality. “And please put some pants on.”

Izumi sighs when he finally swings his legs back to normal sitting position, draws himself up to standing and nabs the nearest pair of sweatpants he can find laying in their laundry hamper. He stuffs them at Leo’s chest and pretends not to see him beaming when he fumbles and slips them on. It’s become a habit he doesn’t think about anymore; making sure Leo’s properly clothed.

Shu scrutinizes him next, narrows his eyes and tightens his arms across his chest. Izumi’s used to being stared at, picked apart and dissected; he can handle one fragile ex-Ranger with a superiority complex.

“Lead the way, then.” He gestures lazily and something in Shu clicks into place, turning down the hallway at a speed walk without so much as a second glance spared between them.

The trek from the pilot dorms to the Shatterdome’s main body is long and winding. Leo stays close, their shoulders brushing and steps in sync. Normally, if it was anyone else, it might be irritating, but his annoyance refuses to spark today, damp from where Leo and lack of good sleep steps against the fuse.

Izumi’s only ever seen the hanger in passing. A glimpse of sparks through a closing doorway, passing by the wide windows that line the top floor hallways, a lookout over the hanger’s thousands of meters of space and sound and metal.

It’s even bigger than he could’ve imagined, unthinkably open aired and crowded all at once. They both have to keep gaping at a minimum to stay with Shu’s clipped pace, ducking and weaving in and out the pathways carved by technicians and mechanics in their everyday rut about the place. He stops them with an abrupt raise of his hand next to what appears to be a jaeger’s left foot, raised and locked into place by an apparatus of steel and cranks.

Shu clears his throat, loud and obvious. Leo’s head keeps tilting farther and farther back, following the line of the ceiling all the way up. Izumi flicks his nose.

“Kiryu.”

There’s a slight shuddering, the roll of wheels, and then Kiryu Kuro’s head appears from under the jaeger’s massive appendage.

“Oh. Good. You found them.”

Kuro’s six feet of hard striped muscle and gruff edges, dark eyes always narrowed and body pulled tight ready to spring. His hair’s a streaked back mess from running his hands through it, some refusal to clip it back away from his eyes.

Shu sniffs again, brushes some imaginary dust from the front of his work shirt. “You say that as if you had doubts.”

“No doubts intended.” Kuro swivels out completely from underneath the jaeger, stretches to his full height and wipes his hands on his pulled down jumpsuit. “Thank you, Itsuki. I can handle it from here.”

“Hmph. Obviously.” and then he’s gone, without so much as a second glance spared.

They both watch the empty space where Shu once stood for a few seconds, a few seconds too long, apparently as it prompts Kuro to add, “He doesn’t like crowds. Or people, really.”

Izumi raises an eyebrow while Leo nods, still looking around, probably creating his own world in the confines of the hanger’s walls. He watches from the corner of his eye, the flickering movement of perpetual creation behind Leo’s own green gaze.

“Anyway,” Kuro pats an open palm against the panels of steel beside him, glances between the two of them and the jaeger’s looming profile, meters and meters above them. “What do you think?”

“Of what?” Leo’s reply is almost immediate; it must’ve killed him to be that _contained_ for so long.

“ _Lionheart.”_ There’s the faintest smile on Kuro’s lips when he says it, “She’s all yours.”

Izumi’s still focused on Leo, watching for the tiniest flits that pass over his face, configuring, disbelief, excitement. Then everything suddenly snaps into place.

Leo’s sprinting ahead of him before Izumi can so much attempt to grab at the hood of his jacket, instead nearly tripping over his own feet to keep up with him when he races forward, turning sideways to squeeze through narrow spaces, mouth gaping. Izumi keeps glancing up, back and forth between Leo and the jaeger. _Their jaeger._

“ _Lionheart_ …” he breathes the name into the air like a prayer, brings his hand up to a midnight blue black armor panel, tracing the gold outlines with the ghost of his fingertips. It towers over them, and Izumi cranes his neck to look into its jagged cut face of silver and steel; where their control center is. A smile curls at his lips and it feels dangerous, this explosive kind of happiness.

He catches Leo’s reflection in the cold tempered, inky steel, snatches his wide-eyed gaze and fights the smile that threatens to crack his face. He registers the faint echo of it, Leo’s excitement, tingling under his skin and brushing up against his own, sparking warm in the pit of his stomach.

“This is only part of the reason I called you both here.” Kuro’s leaning up against a table piled with tools, eyes quiet and level, somehow magically slipping back behind them without notice.

“Tetsu,” Kuro’s voice echoes over the drill and hum of human and electric activity alike. A black spike of hair pops up from behind a workbench, unidentified streaks of coal stripping his sharp face. He trots over, casting only a glance their direction, a little weary, a little awestruck.

“Find that mad dog and tell him we’re running hydraulics testing on _Eclipse_ in fifteen minutes. _Nightwing_ needs to be ready for transport by tomorrow, just in case. Oh, and-“

‘Tetsu’ is already scampering off, an _ossu!_ thrown over his shoulder and skid of his sneakers the only confirmation he’d heard anything at all. Izumi swears he hears Kuro mutter a _good enough, I guess,_ before turning his full attention back to them.

He watches Leo flit around _Lionheart_ like it’s the most amazing thing since steamed rice. Not that Izumi isn’t thinking the exact same thing. He just, knows how to control himself. Then Kuro’s gaze suddenly flicks to Izumi, all analytical and warm. It’s a strange dichotomy.

“I’ll take on your drivesuit designs myself. It’s always easier if we’ve met the pilots in person.”

Leo throws his hands in the air in victory, spins on his heels and catches himself on Izumi’s elbow. The question burns behind his throat, claws its way out even though he knows it’s undeserved; they should be grateful for the chances, for the fortunate opportunities. But something tells him to ask nonetheless.

“Why’re you doing this for us?” It comes out rude, more curt than he intended, but it’s not as if Izumi has a stellar reputation to uphold anyway. He can afford this, if it means the answer is what he believes it to be.

Kuro’s thoughtful expression shifts carefully, near imperceptible. “The commander is interested in you.”

A molten rock sinks its way slowly into Izumi’s stomach, Leo suddenly pulled to a point, narrowed in on Kuro’s response. He seems to realize it sooner than most. Izumi’s a little impressed.

“But, I’m also interested,” Kuro continues, an attempt at assuagement, “It’s been awhile since I’ve seen Rangers that look death in the face the same way you two do.”

He huffs under his breath after a moment and shakes his head, “Everyone’s eyes are on Sena and Tsukinaga.”

\\\\\

Their first drop in _Lionheart_ is like learning how to walk again. Second-nature, an adjustment, but less jarring and more reassuring. Like they belong there with an iron second skin, cruel curving titanium blade locked in Leo’s fist, a set of freezing water reactors embedded in Izumi’s palm. _Lionheart_ ’s built to stop and gash, two sides working wholly to create a fiend. They are cold and tempered and when they initiate the handshake Izumi feels like he’s won the world in a snow globe.

The twins brief them on the transport fly over, a city down the coast only a few minutes away with their speed.

_“Our information says it’s a cat 3, but it’s large enough to be on the border. Be careful.”_

_“Sorry to dump you here alone on your first run, but the labs really want a sample of this one, and you’re one of the few who can do it!”_

“Don’t speak too soon…” he feels the need to answer.

Yuuta and Hinata, respectively, parry back and forth, almost impossible to distinguish.

“That’s quitter talk, Sena! No quitters in my jaeger!”

“Hey, it’s _mine too,_ idiot.”

That earns them a laugh, from someone in the control room. Glad his casual exclusion from ownership is amusing.

 _“Tsukinaga-kun, Sena-kun._ ” Eichi’s voice finally creeps over the line, drenched in honey, _“I look forward to commanding your performance today.”_

Something passes over Leo’s face, only there for a flicker of a second when Izumi glances in his peripheral. A hidden rumbling; thunder and purple storm clouds under his skin. But it’s gone before Izumi so much as opens his mouth.

“We’ll be in your care then, Emperor,” Leo half growls and Eichi’s breathy laugh is hardly a whisper.

“My knights will be upset if we don’t come back safe, after all!”

“ _Roger that, then.”_

 _unnecessary,_ Izumi saves his words with a disgruntled look.

Leo’s smile goes wide, feral, _nope! definitely needed!_

 _“Coming up on your drop zone. Ready?”_ Static bursts through Yuuta’s line, a definite sign of foreign interference.

“Permission to smash its head in and send it all the way to Saturn?” Leo says, and Izumi can almost see him grinning, wild and lovely right next door. He doesn’t turn his head to look, keeping his gaze trained ahead but the mental image is infectious; Leo’s thoughts spilling over into Izumi’s at a hundred miles an hour: _pork buns, monsters, Sena!, ocean, excited, Sena, love, love, I love you-_

Hinata laughs into both their ears, lighthearted sing-song a little too cheery for steaming guts and kaiju blue, “Permission granted.”

“Ready to drop,” Yuuta chimes, right on time.

Izumi’s pulse goes sticky in his veins, thundering down to the tips of his toes and he knows Leo feels it too. It’s a rush of blood to the head that’s almost dizzying when they take their first titan step onto the city’s broken tar black asphalt and click _Lionheart_ ’s vorpal blade into place, singing.

\\\\\

By the time they make it back to the Shatterdome, pinky-linked and flushed proud, Arashi’s halfway through a bottle of sake and a retelling of their childhood stupidity. The crew and rangers all crammed into the mess hall and into the soft worn benches; a victory celebration fit for heroes. Or something like that.

They fit their way in, snug between old friends and acquaintances. Izumi draws back, tries to withdraw into the quieter outer reaches but Leo’s hold on his wrist doesn’t falter when he sits between Arashi and another softer faced recruiter, patting the empty space next to him. Izumi grumbles and sinks down, too tired and damp with sweat to fight it.

Arashi’s launching into another story this time, much to everyone else’s encouragement. Souma, the stiff bamboo stalk of a boy is nodding along attentively to every word she says while Adonis combs through his waterfall hair with his fingers, absentmindedly. Tsukasa weaves his way through to bring them all cups of tea and Hajime follows with bowls of rice and heaps of tamagoyaki. It’s the only reminder that it’s in fact middle of the night morning, the twilight hours after midnight and before dawn. He idly runs his fingers up and down Leo’s thigh to stay anchored, watches him scarf down food like he’s starved while Izumi eats with a quiet efficiency.

He doesn’t bother to look up until he hears his name, comfortable in Leo’s meandering wake of noise and colorful explanations. Of course, as always, Arashi doesn’t plan on letting him drift by unscathed. It’s rare that they can all be together like this and yet she’ll still find the time to poke at Izumi’s ego when he’s not looking.

“Why don’t you tell us a story, big shot Mr. Ranger?”

He takes a sip of tea, peers at her over the edge, “I’m not obligated to say anything.” Then again, “Unless you want me to tell them about the time you actually kissed a frog thinking it would be a prince. Remember that? How old were you, fourteen?”

She gapes at him unceremoniously, even earning a soft smile from Adonis, the implacable marble god statue. He raises an eyebrow, a challenge. It feels oddly like coming home.

“Izumi-chan was such a sullen, miserable child.” Arashi starts as if nothing happened, swipes another coat of clear polish over her pinky, drawing back to admire her handiwork. She must’ve started them while Izumi wasn’t stabbing the remainders of his food rather than eating it.

“Anytime he didn’t want to do a shoot he’d make me bail him out. Totally not cute at all. All he wanted to do was dance and hang out with Ou-sama.” A pause, “He also couldn’t tie his shoes until grade school. _I_ had to teach him.” She blows a stream of air over her nails and he can almost see it in her eyes. _Checkmate, Izumi-chan._

He narrows his eyes between her serene smile aimed at him and the tiny clear bottle, calculating the effort it would take to knock it from her hands. Sometimes things call for a change in tactic, instead.

“Don’t talk like you’re my mom or something, Naru-kun. Grosses me out.”

Leo, who’d been tying his jacket drawstring in knots suddenly decides to join the conversation again, “Sena just hates fun sometimes! Right, darling?”

“ _Excuse me?”_ he tries not to choke and effectively fails.

“A joke! It was a joke! Don’t pinch me, okay, I get it!”

Mao hides a laugh with a poor excuse of a cough against Ritsu’s shoulder, tightening his arms around him when Ritsu stirs but doesn’t wake. It’s new, seeing them close like that, and makes Izumi feel like he’s missed something important in the yearlong gap Ritsu had ahead of them.

“But Leader, you weren’t much better either,” Tsukasa pipes up from between Tori and Hajime stealing bites of his cake, Tori needling and poking his side until Tsukasa’s pout shifts from Leo to him.

Leo gasps, all mock shock and embarrassment when he leans dramatically across the table as if to reprimand him, “I was a perfect child, thank you very much. The role of my sister’s prince and my knights’ king was a lot to handle before you’re ten years old. I think it was…” he stops, mouth twisting in concentration and Izumi practically _braces_ himself. “I think it was _marvelous.”_

His English is a cheap copy of Tsukasa’s smooth accent, achievable only through pure imitation. It’s enough to make the whole table burst into laughter, Hajime giggling soft and pink into Tsukasa’s shoulder while he turns an impressive and stuttering shade of red.

“I’ve been _mocked_ …by _Leader_ ,” his mouth moves but barely any sound comes out, and Leo’s undignified look only makes everyone else’s chuckling grow.

“C’mon, Suo, I worked hard on that! You don’t appreciate my efforts?!”

And so it goes. Arashi quips at him but it lacks any bite, Ritsu wakes up enough to steal his cup of tea and stir everyone more. Tsukasa fetches his chess set and loses twice to the gentle-aired recruitment officer, Yuzuru, in back to back and surprisingly brutal matches.

Leo’s leaning hard against his side by the time morning comes, distractedly playing with the drawstring of Izumi’s jacket now after effectively tangling his own, chin resting on Izumi’s shoulder. The room’s slowed now, most trickling off to sleep a few hours before their shifts start or an alarm sounds. Izumi feels like he’s become rooted to the spot, entirely too exhausted to move without an incentive.

“Think they’ll want us to do a press conference tomorrow?” Leo nuzzles closer and starts to tug on Izumi’s sleeve, tracing the ribbed cuff and the edge of Izumi’s palm.

He heaves a sigh. “Probably. It’s part of the job, isn’t it.”

Leo hums. When he’s like this, tired and tamed it’s almost enough to convince Izumi there’s a normal human being hidden in there.

“Tired?”

He watches the soft bob of ginger hair against his shoulder when Leo rubs his cheek against the jacket’s thin fabric. His hair’s getting longer now, even when he pulls it back the tip of it still reaches around and tickles the edge of his clavicle. _I should offer to cut it sometime_ , Izumi thinks, hazy.

“Don’t touch my hair,” Leo mumbles, nestling closer like he’s trying to become one with the sleeve of Izumi’s jacket. Then he jerks up, a delayed reaction, and they both stare wide-eyed at one another, blinking in mixed shock and relief.

“Did you just-?”

“ _Yeah_.” Leo’s a little breathless, pink dusting from the tip of his nose and across his cheekbones. “Woah.” Then after another moment, _do it again!_

\\\\\

Kuro had warned them about this.

It starts with the haircut, him catching bits and pieces, just scattered fragments of Leo’s thoughts when he’s close by, stronger when they’re side by side. The first time Izumi’s having a staring contest with his curry when Leo reaches out to tuck his hair behind his ear and yells _PRETTY_ right into their headspace; it makes Izumi throw his spoon across the table. It happens again when Leo rolls his ankle during a run with Tsukasa and Izumi feels the twinge of it back in their room.

The ghost drift is like sharing an apartment, Leo in one room and him in his own with a connector in between; one he could never truly step out of. It’s an adjustment but, then again, he’s always wanted to know what Leo’s thinking.

“What’re you looking at, idiot?”

“You, silly Sena.”

Sometimes it creates more problems than it solves.

“...why?”

“Because you’re..good looking? No that’s, not it – hm. Because you’re beautiful?”

“Aren’t those the _same thing?_ You idiot,”

“Eh? No way! Being beautiful is special! It’s like an extra prize that only the genetically fortunate win! Haha!”

Izumi shuts his eyes and sniffs.

_go to sleep_

_don’t wanna!_

He pushes a heap of exhaustion across their drift, like a test, just to see if it’ll work. Leo strikes back with a cacophony of sound, turns up the volume of his thoughts to blast through Izumi’s window. He opens his eyes to slits and does his best to glare while Leo chuckles behind his hand.

“So,” since he won’t be sleeping anytime soon, “-you just like looking at pretty faces, then? Is that it?” It’s another test, a dip of his finger to tests the waters.

“No!” Leo starts and clamps his mouth shut, gears spinning in his head and thoughts churning in Izumi’s direction, a projection. Izumi gets brief glimpses of Arashi sleeping, Ritsu smiling and Tsukasa pouting, his own face a thousand different ways, light and shadow, frowning and smirking. The world according to Leo.

“What the _hell,_ ” is what he barely manages, trying his best not to sputter at how clear it’d been. How Leo had practically shoved it in his face.

“I think you’re beautiful and like looking at you because I love you, Sen- _mpfh-”_

Izumi’s pillow comes down over his face three times, each accompanying a growing volume of something he could only describe as _giggles._

“You can’t _say_ stuff like that when we’re in bed together, stupid!”

“Sena, don’t be so _scandalous,_ what will people think?!”

“We’re the only ones here, dumbass.”

And Leo’s suddenly everywhere, his arms thrown around Izumi, knees against his thighs, face buried in his neck. “Exactly! I have you all to myself!”

Warmth curls up all around him, wraps scalding tendrils around his arms and his chest, anywhere close enough for Leo to touch.

 _get off_ he thinks, without any real force. His palms are cinderblocks, heavy when they land on the dip of Leo’s shoulder blades, the small of his back. The force is there; the force to push him off, push _away, away, away_ , but it’s snubbed out as soon as the thought surfaces.

_don’t think so!_

Leo’s resting his cheek against his chest now, gazing up like Izumi’s strung the world together.

 _don’t do that,_ he tries to shut the door between them, hoping he’s alone, _it’s not fair._

\\\\\

It isn’t. Leo doesn’t play by the rules, even if he won’t break them. He’ll bend and find loopholes and make his own, but never break. It’s a practice Izumi’s slowly getting the hang of after all these years, too.

_happy._

He casts it across the tiny space between them one night, side by side, tip of his finger tracing the delicate lines of Leo’s upturned hand. They’re both exhausted, sated after days of no breach activity: a category 3 with twelve pairs of eyes and as many rows of shark teeth to match. It’d taken hours, memory turning hazy with sweat and sea spray but he remembers finally sliding _Lionheart'_ s blade through the thick of the kaiju’s skull, Leo bowling him over only half out of their drive suits and kissing his face all over.

_that was amazing! we’re amazing! you’re amazing, Sena!_

He tries to compartmentalize it, _happy_ , an unfamiliar word that stings when he reaches out to touch, sours in the back of his mouth when he tries to say it out loud. It’s never been quite right; sitting impatiently in his throat like it doesn’t belong there.

_really happy._

It’s embarrassing already, a silent admission in their private headspace and yet it still feels like a violation; a pact they signed years ago to never let things go this far.

Leo’s breathing steady and quiet, asleep, maybe, and Izumi contemplates grabbing his shoulder and shaking him awake, _hey? did you hear me? did you know you make me happy? happier than anyone in the world? did you know-_

_me too_

Izumi inhales so sharp it’s needles in his lungs. Leo cracks two tired eyes, corner of his mouth pulled up, and his voice is well worn with exhaustion, warm and barely a whisper.

“You make me really happy too, Sena.”

He’s feels raw and overexposed, busted open with all his filth and dirty deeds clinging to the curve of his rib cage, nowhere to hide, nowhere to run. Leo nabs Izumi’s hand where it’s stilled against one of his thin knuckle lines and shuffles in closer, bringing the flat of his fingers to rest near his lips. Almost, barely close enough to touch.

\\\\\

“You’re coming with us when we drop tonight.” Ritsu says over breakfast, head still planted firmly on the tabletop, cup of tea growing cold beside him. If Izumi didn’t know any better he’d have thought he was sleep talking. Mao had carried him in, spotted Izumi and made a beeline, dashing back off with a lingering touch on Ritsu’s cheek and throwaway _thanks_ in Izumi’s direction.

“What for?” It’s too difficult to tuck the annoyance in his voice away at six in the morning. Not as if Ritsu minds, anyway. They each have a few kills under their belts now, comfortable enough to sit in the canteen without the same edge of apprehension as the first couple of months brought.

The shrug of his shoulders is an absolute bare minimum of effort. “Maa-kun told me to let you know. Ecchan’s orders.”

Something about the Emperor’s name, even in cutesy Ritsu nickname form, stirs a swirl of unease into his morning coffee, makes it harder to swallow down.

“Ah.” Ritsu starts, stops, maybe thinking better of it. “Suu-chan and Haakun, too.” He shifts to let his chin rest on the tabletop, the first veritable display of being alive he’s given since being dumped there to disturb Izumi’s peaceful, ungodly hour of the morning. Ritsu looks at him and the air goes chilly, creeps under Izumi’s thin cotton t-shirt.

“They said it’s gonna be a big one.”

\\\\\

_roof. come._

_why?_

Leo sends a long, pleading _pleeeeaaassseeeeee_ until Izumi shoots him the mental equivalent of the finger along with an _i’m coming._

When he creaks open the door at the top of the stairs he’s blinded, almost immediately. The sun’s breaking out from behind the clouds at just the right moment, scattering ashen light over the building top and dull gray-green ocean surf. Leo’s leaning up against the railing, practically halfway over the edge. Izumi’s jolt of panic whips and snaps across the drift and Leo puts his feet back on solid concrete, whirling to meet his eyes as he walks.

“Don’t do that kind of shit, idiot.”

“You’re so cute, Sena, don’t you know your little _tsundere_ act won’t work on me anymore?”

“Did you call me up here to insult me? I’ll leave.” He sticks his index finger against Leo’s cheek once he’s close enough and Leo grins around it, shakes his hair loose from the breeze.  

“Nope! Just for old times’ sake.” Leo tilts backwards on his heels to lean his elbows against the railing, facing the door while Izumi turns towards the sea.

“Nostalgic, isn’t it?”

Izumi scowls at the long drop below their feet, annoyed all over again at Leo’s carelessness.

“We didn’t live next to the ocean in high school. It’s nothing alike. Also, this roof is too high-”

Leo wails, “You’re hopeless! Totally hopeless! What am I gonna do with you? Dear God, please send a curse of sentimentality upon sweet Sena. Amen, and- _huh?!_ Wait a minute! He’s laughing! It’s a _miracle, everyone_ , Sena Izumi knows how to laugh!”

And he is laughing, struck suddenly with how _ridiculous_ it is. They kill vicious sea monsters from another world in their giant humanoid piece of miracle machinery and Leo can still make him remember the breeze off their high school’s roof, the scent of drying laundry and poorly recorded song stanzas. He still stands on his tiptoes on the edges of buildings and doesn’t expect Izumi to jump in and save him.

“You’re...” He’s wheezing, choking on his own rusty laugh, “-you’re so _dumb._ ”

 _now look who’s being insulting,_ Leo forgoes speaking, a pout twisting his mouth.

Izumi waves his hand, shooing away the thought from in front of Leo’s face, nudging their elbows together. He waits a few minutes for the silence to grow and stretch between them. He still doesn’t love the ocean, how it stretches so far off into the horizon, far away from anywhere small footsteps alone could take him. It’s there as a quiet reminder, their mistake and salvation all bundled up into a few neat millions of kilometers of salt and sea.  

“You’re right,” is what he finally admits. “It’s nice.” He keeps his eyes on the outgoing tide, the ceaseless push and pull.

Leo’s gone quiet, for once, that faraway gaze overtaking his eyes; a veil. Izumi knows it’s there without looking, senses it like a silent and ugly elephant in the room.

“But I still don’t see what you love about it so much.” He’s talking to fill the void, the spots Leo neglects to pencil in a respectable answer.

“You don’t have to get it, because I love all of it! The view and the water and sand and our roof and every roof and you.”

“…you just tacked me on at the end there, didn’t you?”

“Hmm, but it’s true,” Leo tilts his face up to the sky, sea salt moon and the last remainders of sunlight sliding over the crown of his head, gentle red fire on the curve of his lip. All of a sudden Izumi very badly wants to touch him. “I love everything about you, Sena.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“I do!”

The eye roll is involuntary, “You tell everyone you love them.”

Leo rolls a little closer, eyes still trained on the bruising sky. “But you’re different, y’know.” He pouts and Izumi crushes the _cute_ from his mind before it drifts away. “I love you in the ‘I wanna marry you’ kind of way, Sena.”

Izumi’s heart lurches, crashes and batters against his ribcage like a frightened animal and, oh god, he’s going to _die_. They’re going to type up his autopsy report with the words _Tsukinaga Leo_ listed under cause of death.

“Don’t be stupid-”

Leo laughs and it’s loud, _too loud_ , “Do you want me to write it down and make a list of everything I love about you? Because I can-”

“ _No."_

“Too bad!”

He groans, stuffs his face as far into the crook of his arm as he can, “Shut up, stupid, idiot Ou-sama.”

“That’s so redundant it’s funny! See, it’s easy to see why I love you! You’re spiky and get mad at me easily but it’s not because you _hate_ me or something,”

“Oh yeah? Wanna bet?”

Leo shuffles even closer along the railing, and his grin is like when they were eleven and heard Tchaikovsky in their music class; the smile Leo had when he fell in love with music. It’s the same except _different_ because now Leo’s looking at _him_ not at a scribbling of notes on a page and suddenly it’s like the earth’s been ripped out from under his feet and replaced with rolling ocean.

“Mm!” he throws up a peace sign, chomps his fingers together to poke at Izumi’s side like a small, scaly creature.

“I’d bet my life on it!”

\\\\\

The sun’s already beginning to set when they station a handful of kilometers off the coast, bloody sunset to their backs and the waves barely lapping at _Lionheart_ ’s heels. _Eclipse_ kneels in closer to the shoreline, black and red reflective panels making it look smaller than it truly is in the fading half-light. The cold clip of its spiked fist and artfully curved, half-moon armor fits its pilot’s fighting style; close, bloody-handed and secure. He’s seen Ritsu and Mao do battle more times than he cares to count and it’s a little mesmerizing, how well they click.

Leo must sense his train of thought, pouting at him when he pulls on the sleeve of Izumi’s conscious through the drift. He shifts to look Leo in the eye even though he doesn’t need to, takes in his puffed out cheeks and narrowed gaze.

_your face is ridiculous_

All Leo sends back is a series of clicks. Izumi rolls his eyes but it’s hard to hold back the pulsing _fond_ that rolls between them, huge and unintentional. It’s almost frightening, being close to something that massive and unknown.

_gross_

_we’re adorable! you’re adorable! embrace it, Sena!_

“It sure is quiet out here,” Mao snaps them both back to reality, to Izumi’s annoyance.

“Don’t fall asleep, Rittsu!” Leo’s voice is abrasive outside their head, almost too much.  

The line buffers for a moment, a characteristic sigh, “Please do not encourage him, Leader.”

 _King Killer_ is an old relic from a bygone age; a reliable Mark 1 that every rookie cycles through before getting their own jaeger. Another rite of passage that every pair of pilots goes through – Tsukasa and Hajime serving as no exception.

Ritsu’s yawn is probably real when he says, “It’s too late. Goodnight.”

_“At least try to act professional. We have company,”_

_“Are you referring to me, Aoi-kun?”_ The upright formality belongs to only Keito, second in command with all the dirty duties of an actual commander still resting on his shoulders.

Two resounding _yes!_ come at once and Leo snorts softly at Keito’s almost palpable bewilderment across their communication line. He clears his throat and Izumi can almost see his peering gaze.

“ _I’m merely here to observe the new Ranger’s first run in the Commander’s stead. The rest of you can pretend I do not exist if it so pleases you.”_

The sea floor trembles, and they all sense the announcement before it comes:

“ _And we’re live, folks. There’s our breach action.”_

“Don’t take them all for yourself this time, Ou-sama.” Ritsu’s barely above a drawl, the edge hidden underneath.

Leo throws a crooked grin in Izumi’s direction and he catches it with one of his own.

“It’s not like we can help it, Kuma-kun.”

“Try to keep up now!”

_“Category two, incoming.”_

The stretch of water to their left ripples harshly, as if carved away and opened like a hatch, a row of blood orange dorsal fins slicing through the opening like a gash. Tensions snaps with all eyes on the water, and Izumi counts their breath in sets of threes, tightens his grip on the controls like a vice.

A screech launches through the water and then they’re moving, the kaiju’s magenta streaked head bursting through the surface and barring two hognose snouts. _Eclipse_ starts out the closest, snagging a striped neck barely in time. The kaiju struggles, jaws snapping too close for comfort before a harsh curved saw blade fist swings low, cuts a deep edge across one thrashing throat into the other. Blue spurts across _Eclipse'_ s chest plate, steaming and acrid in the dying remnants of a summer day.

Leo’s charging before they exchange a single word, arching back to flank the flailing, spiked tail and bury their blade deep against a shoulder muscle. It’s small fry for them, something either could’ve handled on their own. Izumi grits his teeth and grabs a solid hold of slick scale flesh and twists, ice coursing down through his veins and stabbing deep against a rapid beating heart.

And then all hell breaks loose.

He’s used to hearing the command tower in his ear as a constant, but it’s suddenly chaotic, a dozen different voices all at once. The crash from behind them shakes the ocean floor beneath, and Leo curses in his ear, extracting and swiveling to smack a snarling maw with the back of their left fist.

 _double event,_ the vocabulary surfaces in his mind, dredged up from early lessons in the Shatterdome’s recesses. Then Ritsu’s words that same day, just a few hours old, _they said it’s gonna be a big one._

“Suo, take the rear!”

 _King Killer’s_ there fast, but not fast enough, giving the kaiju enough time to slink it’s way around their foot and tug, just out of Izumi’s reach. They tumble backwards, the taste of saltwater only a memory when their pod goes under but disorienting all the same.

 _okay?_ He sends, just to make sure. A claw scraps across their window pane, squealing. They manage to snag a leg this time and Izumi breaks it off after a second of frozen energy collapses the bones within in.

_i’m fine. suo?_

As if on cue the kaiju’s thick neck is clamped on and pulled up to the surface, bringing them with it. _King Killer_ has it in a chokehold, and it takes no urging for Leo to slice up and through its abdomen, like gutting an eel. It struggles, lashes out and smashes against their lower frame, a sickening noise that sends them back under the water.

The sound is deafening when they climb their way back up, the ocean shelf drop off a gentle slope below. The crash above them send a spool of dread and tightens around Izumi’s lungs, water obscuring their pilot pod panel, so much so that they almost don’t catch it. He blinks, maybe for a second too long.

The sea opens up, pitch black, and when Izumi looks again it’s just in time to see _King Killer’s_ right side be crushed into a pile of scrap metal and fall into the sea.


	2. the snakes, and the people they bite

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> > The drift sits always behind his eyelids as an inescapable dream, lurking, the floor a great roiling ocean when he climbs into bed without bothering to dry his hair. The question escapes before he has the wherewithal to stop it, casting it out into the water like a treacherous sinking ship into a storm.
>> 
>>  
>> 
>> _promise you what? ___
>>
>>> **Notes for the Chapter:**

> :^)

“ _ Breach is active-” _

“Tsukasa-kun?! Tsukasa-kun! Tsuka-”

“ _ Eclipse  _ hold your position-”

_ “Where’s Shinkai-san? How did he not predict when this would happen-“ _

“ _ Category four….it’s a category four-” _

“We need to move, Maa-kun. We have to go.”

“ _ Lionheart prepare to engage again. Are you stable?” _

_ sena? sena? _

“Ritsu, I think we need the boosters after all-”

_ he won’t stop, the smaller one, the one with suo, won’t stop screaming, he won’t stop, why won’t he- _

_ i don’t know _

“Sena-senpai, do you copy?”

“ _ Tsukasa-” _

“...we copy. Ou-sama. Leo, listen to me-”

“-could use a little help over here, Secchan-”

_ 45% damage, our hull... can’t take much more than that, sena, _

_ it might have to, _

_ “Hajime-kun, you have to cut the drift-” _

“I can’t, I can’t, I  _ can’t, I-“ _

_ “Are Hakaze and Sakuma-san ready to go? Good. Send them immediately.” _

“Our melee blade is gone we need-”

“ _ Please, Hajime- _ ”

_ let’s go _ .  _ Let’s go, leo _

\\\\\

Izumi decides almost immediately that he doesn’t like hospitals. He pencils them high on the long list only preceded by  _ kaiju, hot weather,  _ and  _ the sea _ . In that order.

When he enters Tsukasa’s room it’s sweltering, all the windows closed and blinds clipped shut. The bed’s a mess of tubes and Izumi almost turns around right then and there, swivels on his feet and runs down the narrow hallways until he can scrub it from the walls of his memory. His body betrays him and takes a few more steps inside.

He doesn’t look at Tsukasa’s face, steels his jaw and takes in the rest of the room first, spacious and pristine save for the blip of a hundred machines, every single one threading in and out of a single body.

The other little one’s asleep next to Tsukasa’s upturned arm, heavy with pic-lines and pale blue veins. His hair’s flat and only faintly peach, a splash of color against the eggshell white of the sheets. Izumi tries to recall his name, digs around for it while his eyes land on Nazuna, curled up in another chair next to-

_ Himemiya, _ his brain finally supplies.  _ Himemiya Tori _ . That’s his name. How could he have forgotten it? The one left behind. Nazuna’s gaze flicks to him, void of much of anything.

“At least you came.”

He sucks in a breath, lets it rust in his lungs. Gingerly, he picks up the tablet hanging against the bed, clicks it to life and reads it until the neatly printed words burn against his retinas, a brand.

_ “Patient name: 朱桜 司  (Suou Tsukasa) _

_ Prognosis: Kaiju attack _

_ Initial examination, diagnosis: 3 fractured vertebrae (C7, T1, T4). Internal bleeding found in diaphragm and liver. Operation removed large unidentified piece of shrapnel from upper scapula. Broken clavicle is set in post-op. Brain damage is a strong possibility but has yet to be expl-” _

“Everyone’s come by except Leo-chin, now.” Nazuna tries again, unfolds his legs from the chair’s cracking plush seat. Izumi flips the tablet back into place, standing at the foot of the bed, unsure where to go.

“If you’re suggesting I do something about that then you’re asking the wrong person,” he finally manages to mutter, and it tastes as awful as it sounds. Like cherry flavored cough syrup.

Nazuna’s laugh is hollow when he stands and stretches, willowy bones and sinewy joints cracking enough to make Izumi faintly wonder how long he’s been sitting here, in this stifling room.

It’s hardly there when he exhales. “Nobody else can, though.”

“Are you leaving?”

Nazuna rolls his shoulders and eyes in unison, catching the swift change of topic between his teeth unwillingly. “I’m going to the other ward to see Hajime-chin. You can take care of things here.”

He opens his mouth and shuts it again quickly, watches Nazuna make his way to the doorway, grip poised on the doorknob. The air conditioner shudders to life, a blast of ice that slithers deep down into Izumi’s gut. Tori whimpers softly in his sleep, curls a little closer into the bed’s comforter.

“How is he?” Names keep escaping, slipping through his fingers, “Shino?”

The silence sits like cotton balls in his mouth, puffy and too thick for him to realize what he’s saying, how Nazuna’s grip tightens on the doorfway edge, framed ghostly against the florescent lights.

“You shouldn’t ask questions when you don’t care about the answers, Izumi-chin. It doesn’t suit someone like you.”

The door shuts with a soft click and Izumi waits until Nazuna’s small footsteps fade, until all he can hear is the sound of his own heartbeat and Tsukasa’s artificial pulse. He dares a glance now at the strewn heap of medical equipment, follows the trail of IVs across and up until he finds Tsukasa’s bruising purple eyelids, the stitched gash that runs along his jaw. It draws him in, the thin line between life and death so carefully bridged before him. He walks slowly to the opposite side of the bed Tori’s sleeping form, measures his steps in careful 1’s and 2’s, halt, breathe again.

Izumi reaches out and almost draws his hand back again, hardly touching the crown of Tsukasa’s head before the tide overflows and drowns him, wrapping around and making everything cold.

“Hey, brat. Time to wake up.”

\\\\\

_ eat. _

_ no. _

_ EAT-  _ he shoves the idea along with the bowl of miso soup this time, more insistent. A command rather than a question.

Leo slowly pokes his head out of the mass of twisted blankets piled on their bed, squinting up at Izumi with dark eyes and brows pulled together.

“It’s from Naru-kun,” he says this time, lazily nudging Leo’s shoulder with his hand. He scoots over before Izumi can say another prodding word against him. The bed creaks are muffled by layers of comforters and fleece.

“Naru’s here?”

“Yeah, because of…” He lets it hang there,  _ Kasa-kun _ , a pilot taboo to speak the name of the dying.

“Because of what happened.” Leo finishes for him and takes the bowl from Izumi’s cupped hands, brings it to his lips for a tiny sip.

Izumi leans back on his hands, not wanting to see Leo’s face when he says it.

“You should go see him.” He forms it as a suggestion instead of a question, hoping maybe that this way it’ll be easier. Even after living with Leo physically and mentally for the better half of two years he still doesn’t know what’s effective – what makes him acquiesce and what makes him snap.

Leo goes still, head bowed.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. I doubt he wants to see me.”

Izumi doesn’t bother to tell him that Tsukasa’s still unconscious, that he wouldn’t know Leo was there in the first place and that it wouldn’t even matter. He doesn’t bother to point out that Tsukasa’s always been the most loyal, the most hardworking, the royal little brother that stays despite the mess. All of their wounds are still bloody and infected; it’s just that Leo refuses to let his own heal. It sparks the beginnings of distaste in the back of Izumi’s mouth. He hates himself for it.

“You’ve been wrong before.”

“I’m a genius, Sena, so technically speaking that’s  _ impossible _ .”

“It’s been almost a week.” He swallows the bile back down, “They think he might wake up soon.”

“You’re so hopeful, Sena! So weird.”

Leo casts a fleeting glance when Izumi glares at the back of his head.

_ you’re a bad liar,  _ and then out loud after another sip of soup, “But that’s good, then! Suo would want me to look him straight in the eye anyway, don’t you think? Maybe I’ll make him a medal of honor, all silver and purple, I bet he’d like that.”

Izumi tries not to grit his teeth, clutches a fistful of sheets in its stead. It’s never been easy, to simply say what he means and mean what he says; it always comes out sharper and more jagged than he wants. A tip of poison on his tongue that always gives him away. He measures his breath but the frustration still threatens to boil over at any second.

“This isn’t…a game, Ou-sama. We aren’t children and this isn’t your goddamn  _ backyard _ we’re playing in, it’s-” His fingernails carve crescents through to the flesh of his palm. “It’s more complicated than that.”

_ our stupid king won’t even see our stupid little brother in the hospital one building over it’s pathetic, pathetic, pathetic, what’re we supposed to do, what do we- _

The bowl clinks softly when Leo sets it on the floor, still mostly full. He draws his knees up and scoots backwards, twisting around to look Izumi straight in the face. Izumi holds still, suddenly afraid of scaring him off. Not that Leo’s ever given him a reason to be, but he’s always been flighty with others, whenever it counts. Yet Leo’s leaning forward now, hair a tangled mess against his cheek where he’d laid against the pillow for too long, eyes fixated at a spot on Izumi’s neck. Still skittish, but trying.

“I know that, Sena.”

And in that moment something in Izumi collapses, a bare bones emergency frame that had kept him together for a few weeks too long. Leo finally meets his eyes, golden green, swimming,  _ there _ , looking at instead of through him. His tongue is heavy in his mouth, suddenly stuck with nothing left to bite at. They’re at the brink of something and his chest aches trying to figure out the details, a carved out space that flutters when Leo leans in closer. For a second he looks jarringly unsure, voice barely a whisper, no need to be anything more. “I know how these things work, so,” and suddenly it’s not about Tsukasa, or kaiju, or the end of the world, or Leo’s reluctance.

It’s a look Izumi isn’t used to: Leo in all his carefully obscured insecurity, plain and simple on his face like it’s been there all along. He allows himself to be pulled forward, giving into Leo’s gravity after so many years of resistance.

Leo’s fingers latch onto the hem of his shirt, twisting. “So, if this isn’t a game, then-“

The brush of his lips is careful, holding back. Izumi doesn’t close his eyes, forgets to, doesn’t want to, he can’t tell; it’s over too fast. The slow tingling of Leo’s chapped lips against his mouth spreads down his arms, through to his fingertips, racing and ebbing to scorch between his ribs. He catches Leo watching, glances between his mint leaf eyes and pale, rusty mouth. And he kisses him. Again, and again, slower, dripping, pushing. Leo pushes back this time, slides his hand up Izumi’s abdomen, across his chest to rest against his neck, exhaling softly, a sigh of relief when Izumi reaches his own shaking hand to touch Leo’s hair.

He pulls back and it’s like he doesn’t  _ have  _ lungs anymore, and Leo’s drowning him in the drift with no words, just feelings, just  _ this _ ; something huge and terrifying and dangerous. He’s stroking his thumb across the skin of Izumi’s throat slowly, as if afraid the spark might light them both on fire. Izumi wonders if he would even mind dying right now at all. This might be enough to last him through a few deaths and then some.

Leo wipes a tear from his cheek with his sleeve and Izumi tries not to think about kissing it away – he doesn’t have the right. So he moves to kiss Leo’s mouth again because it’s more than what he deserves, almost more than he can handle. He’d been starving without taking notice, his hunger for Leo manifesting in misplaced obsessions and compulsions but it makes  _ sense _ now.

_ only you,  _ he hopes it somehow makes it through Leo’s sudden stream of enthusiasm. He breathes a laugh against Izumi’s mouth, swipes his tongue against his teeth as they tumble backwards.

_ only for you _

\\\\\

“How’s our ‘Leader’ doing?”

Izumi would wince at Ritsu’s casual use of the nickname if he had the energy. People cope with things in different ways and sometimes he forgets that Ritsu’s the careless type when he’s sleep deprived. He and Mao had been on alternating 12-hour shifts with Hokuto and Subaru since the triple event; Izumi doubts Ritsu’s ever been awake for that many consecutive hours in his life.

“He’s been asleep all day. I wish he’d share, I feel like I’m vibrating out of my skin.” He can’t help the self-deprecating laugh that escapes when he says, “my head’s too quiet.”

“You’re hopeless, both of you.” Ritsu echoes his own thoughts, leans his head back against the wall, eyes heavy lidded. Izumi groans and pillows his head on his folded arms.

“You might be right for once, Kuma-kun.”

Ritsu hums and slides to fall primly against Izumi’s hunched over shoulder like he’d been waiting for the opportunity to use him as a pillow the whole time. It’s probably uncomfortable but that’s never stopped him before. Nostalgia twists and digs dull claws against Izumi’s heart.

“It’s always been like that, with the two of you.”

It digs in deeper. His laugh is meant to be scathing but it burns his throat raw. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“You know what, Secchan.” Ritsu drawls, traces lazy circles on the back of Izumi’s arm. “You have a nasty habit of self-sabotage so, I think just this once, you need to let things happen.” He taps two dots and a twisty frowning mouth. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

Izumi’s determined not to think about it; about kissing, about touching, about loyalty, about _Leo._ His skin goes hotter with only the ghost of it. Ritsu’s uncanny senses for imbalance are surely ticking but they’re both grumbling and grumpy and it’s 3 in the goddamn morning. Izumi doesn’t want to play word guessing games when he’s only on his second cup of coffee.

“…don’t be so annoying.”

“Hmm, then make me.”

Izumi makes a noise in the back of his throat that means nothing and everything all at once and Ritsu slumps more onto his shoulder to get comfortable. It’s an old and familiar habit, and if Izumi was following by their established routine he might complain, attempt to shove Ritsu off with a shrug of his shoulder and slink a few feet further away. Establish the barrier. But he’s too tired to pretend the warm and heavy weight against his back isn’t a sort of kindness, soft where he should be strong.

“It’s because he makes you better, Secchan.” Ritsu’s voice is small, bordering on smug sleepiness. His words are muffled, face buried in the fabric of Izumi’s t-shirt. For the first time in a long time Izumi really wants to punch him. It’s so like Ritsu; to say what nobody else wants to.

“Shut up.”

“Ou-sama makes you a better person. And I think you know it.”

\\\\\

Izumi feels it before he sees it.

Leo’s anger is pulsing and blue, burnt smolders and injured pride. It’s like a hiss of toxic air across the drift, and Izumi notices Mao flinch when he glances his direction.  _ It’s not personal _ , he wants to say, just a byproduct of unfortunate connection and deep-rooted feelings. Instead he pushes away from the wall of the kwoon room and makes for the door, waves his hand and scoffs when Nazuna calls his name, curious.

“It’s nothing, just Ou-sama. I’ll be back.”

The momentum of Leo’s wrath carries him along the hallways, and he’s pissed it’s affecting him, left unsure if the emotion is even truly  _ his  _ at all. He can trace the thread of the drift like a burning invisible line. Unsurprisingly it takes him back to their room where the sense of vitriol and smoldering embers is more palpable, so much so it stirs his irritation into a higher gear.

_ stupid stupid stupid emperor listen to me, listen, nobody listens, faker, liar, liar, i need to, i have to, i- _

His hand hesitates over the door handle. Whatever’s happening inside might be a massacre; he thought the drift would help him know what Leo’s thinking but it’s just as jumbled as ever, a string that’s too tangled and breaking into dead ends to follow.

_ really, _ he sets his fingers on the handle’s edge,  _ you’re so troublesome. _

Leo yanks the door open before he can so much as push down. He’s in various states of undress; one of Izumi’s old high school shirts pulled halfway on, messy ponytail nearly shaken loose, a single white sock on his left foot.

“Take that back.”

Izumi twists his mouth. “No way. It’s the truth.”

Leo squints, something deeper stirring, but Izumi feels the intensity from before ebb, a wave only lapping and spitting at the shore instead of snarling.

“Are you going to let me in? Or is this suddenly king quarter’s only?”

Leo makes a jarring, frustrated noise, somewhere between a sigh and cough, and leaves the door open instead of bothering to answer.

The room’s in post-disaster form already, ripped apart and torn inside out like a beast purging its inside of poison. He’d expected that much, at least. There’d been lower magnitude shakes like this before, sometimes low enough that Izumi wonders if he missed them, somewhere along the way. Warning signs.

Leo’s rooting around somewhere in the bathroom now, nearly causing a collision when he races back out again, slams a sheet of paper on the wall as if to tack it there with brute force. Izumi sinks down against the mattress edge and balls his hands into fists to keep them from trembling. He doesn’t know if the anger is his anymore, but if there’s anything Izumi’s learned from the times before, when Leo’s racing forward on a quest to nowhere, sometimes there’s only one thing left to do.

Wait.

He’s not sure how long they stay like that, it’s difficult to gauge time in a room of solid concrete. But he waits. He watches Leo slowly but surely return to solid ground, pull his arms through the sleeves of his shirt and yank the hair tie out completely. Eventually the furious clicking at their shared laptop stops, the fluttering front flaps of a hundred folders begins to slow.

He falls into fitful rest wrapped around Izumi’s torso, finally burning himself out on pacing and thirty pages of illegible notes laying in stacks around their room. Future jaeger battle formations on their tiny dresser, tactical strategies on the bedside table, improved plate armor designs in the sink. He’d only happened to glance the contents in a moment of lull between bursts, only reading enough to send a prickle of apprehension across his abdomen. It isn’t his business; he chants it like a mantra, trying to believe any ounce of truth it might offer. He should leave it alone.

Because Izumi’d become his canvas too, inevitably, hard pressed blue ink crawling over his wrist and up his forearm, across his collarbone and against the soft skin of his neck. Waiting pays off, in the end. Leo’s hand skitters blindly down his arm, searching. Maybe Izumi has some newfound boldness that allows him to find it with his own, that allows him to hold and squeeze back.

“You don’t have to talk about it. Not if you don’t want to.”

Leo scrubs his face against him, still mumbling even after running in circles for hours, like a blackened fuse that refuses to stop sparking. One day he’s going to burn out. Izumi kills the thought before it matures any more than that.

“Hey.” He has to bend near in half to do it but he moves so that they’re eye level, if Leo were to look up from where he’s buried against his side. He does, eventually, just a peek of green and twilight around pink rimmed lashes. The words cram against his throat, so tangled and different that he suddenly doesn’t trust himself to say any of them. He keeps his mouth occupied instead and presses his lips to the top of Leo’s head, settles there and pretends, for just a moment, that he isn’t choking.

The drift is still, eerie in comparison to the violent waves that ripped across it only hours before, no signs of the damage done underneath.

_ sena. _

_ it’s okay _

_ sena. sena, i lov- _

_ it’s okay. it’s fine. _

\\\\\

When he wakes up the bed is already cold. Cold, curling in his arteries like a creeping frost, forcing a shiver down his spine before he can throw the covers back. He pads to the bathroom out of habit, seeking hot water to dump down his scratching throat.

Leo’s normally a furnace that leaves Izumi almost sweating in the middle of the night. So why-

He peeks around the bathroom doorway at the mess of sheets, eerily still, a funny twinge against the parapet guarding the still beating parts of his heart. Cold sweat crawls up his arms, the bottom of his feet numb and stumbling when he searches for his clothes and finds the drawers half empty, his old worn in sweatshirt missing from its hanger in the closet. Izumi digs his phone out from a drawer stuffed with pamphlets and hairpins, fingers hovering over the numbers before he realizes Leo’s own sits in the same spot, virtually unused and untouched.

Every shuddering breath he takes is an inhale of pins and needles, stilted pond water that fills his lungs and pounds against his back, wordless. His thoughts are mechanical, a void that he doesn’t know how to fill up. Izumi isn’t surprised. Strangely, he finds he isn’t much of anything.

The drift had gone silent.

Everything starts to hurt at once, a sick Pavlovian reaction that throbs low and dull. He casts his eyes around the room, wanting to cling to  _ something _ , a fragment Leo might’ve left behind as a sign, a breadcrumb trail leading somewhere else.

He doesn’t spot it until he’s near given up on finding a single ounce of Leo left in their room at all. The scrawl is slanted and familiar, a clean stab wound straight through his back, taped against their door, just a tiny piece of scrap paper Izumi recognizes from his debriefing notebook.

_ “don’t look” _ And then a few lines under it, as if an only barely given second thought,  _ “long live our treasonous emperor!” _

Izumi traces the outline of the pen strokes with his thumb, his nerves growing roots into the floor and up across the ceiling. Because it’s obvious now that Leo Tsukinaga had gathered up everything, all his strangeness and warmth, every mismatched piece of his universe, and left without so much as a goodbye.

\\\\\

The call comes over the loudspeakers within a few hours the same day. It’s a summons to the main control room with Izumi’s name stamped on it. Kuro casts him a furtive glance when he stands to go, almost like an apology. Izumi would’ve spit in his face if it’d been anyone else; if it had been anything but sincere.

Keito evaporates at his side when he enters the control room one steely walk later, leads him firmly through an adjoining hallway and forward, on and on and on until Izumi nearly picks his thumb raw with dread.

Commander Tenshouin is hardly one to suffer a sole Ranger, alone in the drift and the world all at once, and Izumi doubts he’s any exception to the rule.

“It seems your co-pilot, Tsukinaga-kun, has requested-” Eichi pauses, throws in his signature sickly kind smile for good measure, “-a leave of absence, until further notice.” The office is spacious, lined with photos of his bloodline but Eichi pales in comparison, a faded out reprint of past monarchs; rulers of a different era where the demons came from mankind instead of a crack in the sea.

Izumi curls his tongue, clenches his jaw. Careful now. His fangs are too poisonous to be used in sticky situations, sometimes. Especially against his own kind. Eichi’s framed around the high imperialism of his parents legacy and millions of investment dollars poured into killing monsters; that is to say, there are consequences for anything done in his presence.

“I see.”

The tension is brittle between them, chalk-like. Every breath he takes he inhales a little more, a gathering veil of deadly dust in his throat. Izumi’s never loved their commander but Leo’s stance was more personal, maybe a little too openly spiteful. Apparently, it’s no secret.

“He did not say when he would return,” Eichi stops again, short of breath after only a handful of words. Izumi wants to empty his stomach into the pristine trashcan by his desk as an act of revenge. It isn’t that he hadn’t known what the Commander wanted to tell him beforehand; it’s the way Eichi watches him for a reaction that makes him sick.

“Any ideas?”

“None. Sorry.” He doesn’t mean it. He hopes Eichi never finds Leo, scours the earth and never finds a single trace of his existence. His bitterness knows no bounds.

“I see.”

Eichi’s gaze lingers, blinking slow and measured, the intent clear as hazy doldrums water. He smiles faintly after an unbroken silence and waves his hand, pushes up slowly out of his chair; the throne he’s grown rooted into.  _ You know something, _ Izumi wants to spit,  _ what did he tell you _ . Instead he bites the inside of his mouth until it hurts; until he catches the slimy taste of his own blood.

“Sena-kun, do you want my honest opinion?”

_ no,  _ “You are our commander. Doesn’t that mean you can say whatever you want?”

Eichi folds his hands and leans forward, almost patronizing. “That’s an extreme way of seeing things. It could get you in trouble later if you don’t watch out.”

Izumi smiles as sweetly as he can. A small act of rebellion. “Do you suggest my response be something else, then?”

“No, no, of course not.” His laugh reminds Izumi of weak rain in winter, “It’s a perfect answer. But you see, Sena-kun,” and this is when Eichi pauses again, straightens his spine. Izumi almost flinches when the realization hits one second too early. “I don’t want you piloting for us anymore.”

Just like that, and it’s over. Eichi’s jaw closes against Izumi’s windpipe and splits his jugular like nothing more than candy floss. He’d made his move and won the game Izumi didn’t even know they were playing. Silence floats around them, a dead weight. A knight alone on a chessboard can only do so much once checkmate has been called.

“Anything else?” It hurts less than he thought it would.

“You don’t want an explanation?”

“No.”

“We very much value the mental stability of our pilots, Sena-kun,” Eichi continues, unhearing, “We conduct regular exams to ensure this, as you know. It’s because of this we know that you can be-“  _ i get it, i get it, enough, _ “-unstable, at times. So I’ve made my judgement based upon that. Should I explain further?”

His answer is too fast, too transparent, he’s truly losing now, “No.”

Eichi tilts his head, as if examining a small foreign animal. “Then that’s all, Ranger.”

The dismissal still burns a little, in spite of himself. Too abrupt.  _ You’re useless to me now, disappear accordingly _ . Izumi shoves himself out of the chair faster than he intends, scrubs his palms together to bring some warmth back when he turns without a second glance back.

“Don’t you think he’s running away?” Izumi’s halfway out the door when he catches it, Eichi’s thin voice carrying from his seat by the vaulted window, suddenly much stronger than before. “Don’t you think he’s a coward?”

He slams the door down on its hinges with all the strength his aching arms allow him. He waits to hear the echoing finality of it through the hallway before forcing his feet to move, curls his hands into bruising knuckle fists to stop himself from turning around and punching Commander Tenshouin straight in his viper-tongued mouth.

\\\\\

The bathwater is scalding. He goes under once, twice, three times before the chill begins to falter and gradually leech away. Cold seems to have made a permanent residence of his bloodstream. He’s been bundled up all day and its only October, for god’s sake. Through the water the writing against his skin is sharper, the same shade of blue as his veins. At first he’s afraid to touch it, the remaining fear of getting burned still pressing behind his eyes.

_ is this what you want?  _ he asks one final time. The drift yawns before him, the edge of a great proverbial plain with a great black hole sky.  _ this is what you want me to do? _

Radio silence.

_ fine, then. _

He scrubs at his skin with a practiced diligence, industrial grade bar soap and astroturf washcloth raw, grating. The color bleeds from royal navy to blue sky, from baby blue to spindly gray. The water runs cold by the time he steps out of it, the soft tips of his fingers beginning to prune.

Izumi keeps his eyes off the mirror and focuses on a smidge of rust nestled in the faucets. He’s taken to avoiding them all together, mirrors. Or he tries to, at least. It scratches a cruel claw against a piece of him he doesn’t like to think about. A scrap torn from his fist before he could even realize it was gone. Slashing up aliens isn’t conducive to time for a six-step skin care regimen but he keeps as many as he can, on good days. Even if it doesn’t make mirrors any less difficult to look at.

But he makes the exception this time. He has to. There’s bound to be some marks that he missed. Some lines that stay pressed against the grain of their landscape. His neck aches when he finally lifts his head, tips of his hair sprinkling droplets into the sink’s dusting bowl.

_ promise _ , fading against curve of his neck, where tendon meets muscle. He reaches up to skim the surface of it, pulse thrumming too loud under the delicate pressure of his thumb. A single word,  _ promise,  _ left as the last remainder of the full sentence before it, curled up and barely there. His sigh is shaky when he finally lets it go.  __

Izumi scrapes at the spot long after the ink is gone, until there’s a patch gaping like an open wound above his clavicle, a testament to the public of the rot lingering under the surface.

The drift sits always behind his eyelids as an inescapable dream, lurking, the floor a great roiling ocean when he climbs into bed without bothering to dry his hair. The question escapes before he has the wherewithal to stop it, casting it out into the water like a treacherous sinking ship into a storm.

_ promise you what? _

\\\\\

Leo’s absence is a festering, jagged thing, a gouged out wound that Izumi digs into a little more each day. It’s there in the restlessness that creeps under the covers at three am, there in the long walks that send him down to the sea wall, trudging through rough grained sand and wondering how long it takes for the tide to come in during monsoon season. He snarls and cracks venom between his teeth when he hopes no one’s looking, scrubs his skin back into softness. He skips meals and skips sleep and tries to patch up tender spots; paste cement and scrap metal and hope it sticks.

Ritsu’s the only one who dares approach him now. The only one willing. Arashi had been sent back out with a bouncy new officer trainee as soon as the news about  _ King Killer  _ broke to the public, a ripple no doubt destined to create tsunamis. She’s good at damage control, and they’ve faced worse before. He misses her and wishes he didn’t. Tsukasa remains unchanged, medically induced sleep better than the alternative, better than consciousness and the mess that comes with it. Izumi goes to see him whenever it rains and his body deep-bone aches.

He spends any free time he can in the kwoon room now; if he’s generous by helping Nazuna herd together the new slim-boned recruits, if he’s not by sulking on the sidelines and waiting for the regulars to filter out, challenge anyone who looks at him wrong to an elegant and deserved beatdown. Nazuna’s too gentle to kick him out or force him into patrol duty. A pilot banned from stepping foot in a jaeger might as well not carry the title at all.

“Your lower body strength is really something, Izumi-chin,” Nazuna mutters once, 45 minutes in at their first break between blows. Izumi’s body is screaming at him  _ bad idea  _ with every bruise on his scrappy arms. He’s lost too much weight but it doesn’t matter anymore; there’re worse demons he could be feeding.

Nazuna stretches one leg up behind him, using his staff as a balancer. He’s waiting for something, and it’s irritating enough to make Izumi want to knock his foot to trip him up on purpose. Instead he just swallows his pride down for the umpteenth time, shovels it down his windpipe when it doesn’t go willingly.

“I used to dance, once. Before all-” he hesitates, gestures to his half-eaten soul, the kwoon room’s high walls, a scar that runs a nasty line down his temple, “-all this. I modeled too, not that it really matters.” The last words cascade into a mumble, makes him bite his lip and wish them away.

Maybe Nazuna knows, from years spent crushing and reshaping recruits into soldiers, into warheads, from his own time spent waiting in bated breath to see if tomorrow comes. Izumi remembers the headlines; a talented prodigé hidden away, corruption from within, a ranger mentally unfit to fight again. There’s a reason Shu’s no longer permitted to pilot. So maybe Nazuna knows from digging up his own trauma; knows that some dead dreams should stay good and buried when their edges are too sharp.

Izumi watches him scuff at the padded floor with a small bare foot and clip back a stray slip of golden hair behind his ear. Nazuna’s eyes drift off, and something savage claws at Izumi’s chest. “I had a pet rabbit. Before all this.”

And they leave it at that.

\\\\\

Morisawa Chiaki is likely one of the most insufferable people Izumi’s ever had the misfortunate chance of meeting. He’s heard the stories, the epics, really, about the beast of a boy with a thirst for justice more than any kind of fame or fortune could promise. In theory, a gem for the failing fate of the universe; in practice, a human stuffed full with too much enthusiasm and medication. Or so Izumi suspects.

Chiaki’s presence is overwhelming, suffocating in his too tiny office with the single panel window that peers down to the coast, a clear line of site. Izumi’s starting to learn that he’ll never free of it, the ocean. Their first meeting together is borderline painful, the only noise coming from the tick of a Power Ranger collector’s item clock sitting on Chiaki’s desk edge. Izumi practically snarls at every attempt made at conversation and eventually Chiaki leans back and spends the rest of their session balancing a pen on the bridge of his nose, face stern.

That first time Izumi leaves feeling more grated against than healed. And he’s not surprised to find out from Ritsu that, per the usual, it’s all Arashi’s fault.

It was her idea in the first place apparently, a suggestion not made to him but rather to the higher ups. Something about  _ promoting wellbeing  _ and  _ finding balance _ . He’s sure whatever she said to them was well spun and pretty, convincing enough to have him report to the health management department on his first day off patrol duty in weeks.

On his way over for the second time two weeks later he debates just walking up the stairs and off the roof. It’ll probably hurt less than what he’s about to be subjected to.

Chiaki opens the door before he’s even finished knocking, crushing Izumi in a hug, wringing the air out of his lungs and lifting the heels of his shoes off the floor. Izumi squirms, and he’s strong but Chiaki’s half a head taller and built like an athlete, so it’s not as if he stood any real chance of breaking free. Sometimes it’s the attempt that counts.

“Morisawa, let  _ go,  _ you freak–”

Chiaki’s laugh cuts him off and then Izumi can breathe again, wheezing to try and uncrumple his trachea back down his throat. He doesn’t know what made Chiaki so starved for physical affection but he wishes whoever it was could’ve spared them all the trouble.

Their moment apart doesn’t last long once Chiaki anchors a hand around his shoulder, making it look slight in comparison to Chiaki’s own broad stance.

“So!” and he’s steering Izumi in under the doorframe, like trying to lead a stubborn horse to water. “How’ve you been?”

“I was better before coming here.”

There’s that giant’s laugh again, big enough to fill up a room and leak through the walls. Izumi would describe it as infectious if he wasn’t so contrary to anything soft edged and malleable. They’re only five minutes in and the rooftop is starting to sound more and more tempting by the second.  

“Well, it’ll please you to know then that we won’t be here for long!”

Izumi blinks. “Ha?”

Chiaki grins, chuckling while he gathers up a beaten old sports jacket and throws it over his dress shirt. It’s nice to know he has more than one setting when it comes to laughter. He strides forward and out the door, clasping his fingers around Izumi’s wrist and pulling him right back out the door. “C’mon! Let’s go!”

He stumbles, dumbfounded and warmer now that Chiaki was moving down the hallway, the same direction he’d just come from. Back in the direction of jaegers and sleeping pills, of promises crawling under his skin. Izumi’s half-annoyed half-irritated by the time he untangles his feet enough to walk square with Chiaki’s longer steps, tugging and straining to free his arm from what feels like a vice grip.

“Morisawa, what the hell are you doing? Where the hell are we  _ going? _ ” he asks, in hopes of being wrong about the suspicion creeping in the back of his of mind.

Chiaki hums, noncommittal, that stupid big kid smile a permanent fixture on his stupid face. “You’ll see!”

Izumi can feel his heart and his hope sliding down his chest all the way down to his toes. The farther they venture back into the Shatterdome’s main building the more his suspicion blossoms, and by the time he realizes Chiaki is making a beeline for the kwoon room doors it’s too late to put the brakes on.

“Here we are! Wow, it sure has been a while.” Chiaki finally releases his hold on Izumi’s wrist and gazes around the kwoon room’s rusty pipe streak walls in wonderment, as if seeing them for the first time. It’s surprisingly empty, for mid-afternoon on a weekday. Unless Nazuna owed Chiaki a favor and could have the room given up for private use at a prime time date and time. Something about it all chafes against Izumi’s nerves all the more, not his last one but there aren’t very many to begin with anyway.

“Morisawa,  _ you–” _

“Sena, think fast!”

He barely manages to snag the wooden staff in time before it smacks against his torso, sending him near double over and a string of whispered aggravations past his lips. Chiaki doesn't give any indication of noticing when Izumi looks up again, swinging his own identical staff in a testing pattern of swings and jabs. He stills, holding the staff with one hand while he stripped off his jacket and tie with the other, kicking his shoes away into the corner.

“What are you doing.” It’s more an expression of his innate frustration than it is a question.

“Conversing–” Chiaki whips the staff down until it taps and teeters on the edges of Izumi’s breastbone, soft enough so to not leave a bruise. “–with you. The way we both know how!”

Izumi bats the staff away with his hand, the tip of it scraping uncomfortably against his clavicle. He needs to start eating more again. “Are you an idiot?”

“Hey, I think it’s one of my best ideas yet! And I think it’s going to work.”

“What in the world would give you that ridiculous idea?”

“Well,” Chiaki tilts his head, fringe falling against his eyes. “You're still holding the staff.”

Izumi looks down, stupidly, to realize he is. Why hadn’t he gone to put it back yet?

“So?”

“That means it’s going to work!”

“That doesn’t mean–” he starts but Chiaki’s bearing down on him, swinging squarely above his head fast enough that Izumi hardly has the time to block without staggering back a few steps, growling. Chiaki’s booming laugh is lost among the sound of Izumi’s counters against his attacks, and it borders on manic energy, the kind of aura he has in a fight. Red hot and stifling, a ferocious curling in his gut, contagious, infecting Izumi with every exchange they share. His own jacket and shoes are strewn around the room and Chiaki feints left, Izumi catching it, following, aiming for somewhere between his ribs and meeting wood instead. It feels  _ good _ , because Chiaki isn’t Nazuna, or some green behind the ears newbie; he’s a challenge that Izumi’s never had the chance to conquer before and it feels so  _ good _ . He decides to ignore the fact that Chiaki can definitely tell his plan is working. 

Neither of their breathing’s labored but he can feel the wind leaving his lungs fast, and when Chiaki finally nabs him under the ankle and sends him toppling, Chiaki’s staff pinning his chest to the matted floor, the last of it leaving him in a gasp.

His lungs ache, the kind of pain that borders on pleasant – like a runner’s high. Chiaki’s hovering above him panting, a sheen of sweat along his nose. Maybe Izumi had overestimated his endurance from afar.

“You–” it sticks in his throat and he swallows. “You don’t play fair.”

Chiaki sits up and flops back, his arms splaying out, boneless. He chuckles and even though Izumi knows he should feel some sense of defeat all he can taste is autumn sunlight.

\\\\\

The ghost drift is empty when he reaches for it out of habit, limp and trailing behind, tied to his throat like some eloquent reminder of  _ what might’ve been _ . He prods at it still, every night.  _ Just in case _ , he tells himself. Sometimes his bitterness digs its teeth in deep and gets the best of him, hurling every  _ stupid  _ insult he can think of worthy for such a  _ stupid king _ until his lungs seize up and his cheeks sting.

Other times the pain is less acute, a duller ache when he stares at the smooth steel ceiling, humming. How did that one song go again? The one about the kingdom by the sea? A knight’s silent oath? He can’t remember. The memory is tangled with a thousand others, days spent when the sunlight spilling through his window gave Leo a crown of gold, caught his breath and held it hostage. Izumi sends the thought across the drift, into the ceaseless roll of the black tide and watches it disappear, when it’s a bad day.  

Usually, though, Izumi just talks.

_ did you make sure to eat today? the curry here is still the worst. kasa-kun might be able to leave that hospital room soon enough. naru-kun made me promise to leave nazunyan and his little recruits alone sometimes. i can’t help it that there’s nothing else to do around here. morisawa is a real pain in the ass. i think you’d like him. _

_ where are you? _

_ how’s your little sister? _

_ … _

_ … _

_ I miss you _

_ … _

_ come back _

_ … _

_ come back to me _

_ … _

_ please _

\\\\\

It’s their fourth session together that Izumi begins to take notice. There’s a missing jigsaw piece, almost unnoticeable save for the smallest of warning signs: an empty office not quite moved into yet, an excess of chairs and absence of anything sharp. Izumi remembers how it feels to stay in an unwanted room, but it isn’t until their sixth meeting that he puts fits the pieces into a single, more confusing answer.

“Who’s that?” He points to the beanbag in the corner of the room where the mystery occupant has started to rip the stuffing out of a plush dolphin, giggling.

Chiaki doesn’t miss a beat. “He’s just visiting!” A smile Izumi’s starting to believe is mass produced, “Don’t worry, it’ll be like he isn’t even here. Right, Kanata?”

Kanata looks up, lured in by the syllables of his name. He waves one of the dolphin’s flat fins and hums an eerily familiar song that Izumi can’t quite place. “The sea is ‘calm’ today, Chiaki.” Each sound is drawn out, stretched like saltwater taffy,  _ Chi-a-ki _ lingering in the air with a weight that seems to hold them all down. Like gravity. Izumi swallows down the softball in his throat and tries to calculate how many steps away he is from the door.

“Fantastic! I’m happy to hear it!” The silence breaks with Chiaki’s rumbling laugh. It’s so genuine that Izumi almost hurts for him, even purely out of pity. Kanata’s gaze is fixed somewhere outside the window, petulant and pouting and not-quite-there.

Chiaki leans more across the desk, a casual stance that he does from pure force of will. Izumi resists the urge to scoot away, even if the clunky plush chair doesn’t offer him much leverage.

“Sorry, it really is just for today. Sengoku looks after him when I’m here but he got caught up with helping Nagumo today.” It’s strange to hear Chiaki’s voice when he’s not at full volume, almost a whisper. Almost capable of keeping secrets. Izumi isn’t sure if he likes it or not.

He mirrors Chiaki’s conspiratorial lean, “Isn’t this a violation of my privacy? I’m no expert on these things but I’m pretty sure this is against the rules, Morisawa.”

“Ah, well,” and Izumi doesn’t miss it, the sideways glance Chiaki tries to hide, the glint of pain hidden there like black diamonds, hot under pressure. “I don’t think you really have to worry about him listening or anything like that, Sena. Trust me.”

There’s a moment then, when Chiaki smiles and Izumi doesn’t feel like snatching it off his face out of spite, when he wants to grab a fistful of his hair and ask him just what the hell he thinks he’s doing. It must show on Izumi’s face too, a fierce kind of want for understanding between them. But Chiaki draws back and the clock starts to tick again, a steady heartbeat. Kanata’s hand rests on the windowpane, alert and stock still. Waiting for something.

The rest of their time is spent cutting up the high-strung tension in the air, Chiaki parsing details of Izumi’s past and Izumi scowling and snapping when he draws too close to some unspoken, buried truth. Business as usual. Chiaki’s making a pointed effort not to look at Kanata so Izumi does the same. All he catches is a blank stare from the corner of his eye, the faint mumblings of garbled nonsense in slow counting syllables. He ignores the chills that run down his spine when Chiaki blindly offers his hand  beneath the desk and Kanata pokes at it like a foreign entity before tracing the lines of his palm. As if he was an alien seeing it for the first time. 

\\\\\

“What’s the deal with him?” He asks point blank over lunch, half an onigiri left on his plate.

Kuro lowers his chopsticks, mouth half open before he frowns. “Who?”

“Morisawa.”

“Ah,” It’s as close to discomfort as Izumi’s seen him get, “ _ that.” _

He waits, trying to be patient. Trying to pretend like it hasn’t been eating at him for days; that there’re things he still doesn’t know about this place they call ‘home’. The Shatterdome’s the perfect example of a crustacean, cracked and filthy against the break of the waves. It isn’t that Izumi  _ cares _ . It’s the fact that being left in the dark leaves more places for an infection to fester. He’s tired of secrets.

“It’s not my place to say.” Kuro finally continues, picking up his chopsticks again. He contemplates a mouthful of corn salad before thoughtfully putting it down again. “You really don’t know?”

“Why would I ask if I did?”

Kuro’s puzzling look is unsettling, stirs a morbid curiosity that sends Izumi’s jittery foot tapping harder against the floor. “They did a better job at covering it up than I thought…”

Izumi doesn’t have time to needle him again before Kuro adds, “You should ask Morisawa himself. His account will be the least biased.”

“That would require actually  _ talking  _ to him, Kiryu.”

His laugh is low, closed-mouth and intimidating. Without knowing him it might come across as taunting, but Izumi’s caught it enough times to make sense of it. The warmer layer that permeates everything  _ Kuro _ .

“Ever think that might not be such a bad thing?”

“Whatever, leave me alone.”

“You’re the one who sat across from me.”

Izumi sips loudly on his drink in response and it feels almost good, almost right. Next to normal.

Then it hits him, as it always does; mistakenly and fondly like a loving knife to the gut. A vacuum chest that sucks his insides down until he remembers – remembers the indecency of thinking he could forget. Kuro’s eyebrows scrunch now, a question mark, but Izumi pulls the curtains closed and does his best to look lethal.

Because he knows Kuro notices, knows that he catches Izumi’s right hand reaching out to the space beside him only to curl around empty air.

\\\\\

“I’m requesting you be sent on a PR campaign!” Chiaki throws on his million watt smile like it doesn’t blind everyone who looks at it, “It’ll be fun!”

Izumi tries not to slump further down in his chair and settles for glaring at Chiaki’s embarrassing enthusiasm, as if the more he stabs it with his eyes the sooner it’ll go away.

“…I think our definitions of fun are very different, Morisawa.”

“It’s only a few weeks long. Plus you’ll be with the veterans so I doubt you’ll really have to work that hard!”  

Something hard knocks against the confines of his stomach, a roiling ball of automated defensiveness at the possibility of  _ new people _ . Chiaki tilts his head like he can tell, like he knows the inner workings of Izumi’s biology like a clockmaker, observing a relic near the end of its lifespan. Izumi squints at him.

“And if I say no?”

Chiaki perks up, reminded, rifling around in his desk drawer for a moment before flopping a few manila folders down, close enough for Izumi to read without having to move.

“Sakuma Rei and Hakaze Kaoru,” he mutters, without thinking, snapping his mouth shut as soon as the names slip carelessly past.

“You know them, don’t you?” Chiaki clasps his hands in front of him on the desktop, fingers interlocked and holding tight. It’d be a defeat to admit it now. Izumi curls his fingers into a fist before unfurling them again. A practice in impulse control.

So maybe Chiaki does have him figured out. To a certain extent. Thinking of it as anything more than that makes his stomach roll. Chiaki’s leaning closer now, his eyes the golden, charred remains of campfire wood.

“Sena,” he says, and Izumi hates the way it makes him coil up tighter, how every fiber in his being wants to resist the sound of his own name. “You’ll be fine. Trust me, okay? Think of it as–”

“It’s not a vacation, you weirdo.”

“Well not with  _ that  _ kind of attitude it’s not.” Chiaki narrows his eyes but there’s no malice in it, more playful than it is frustrated. Izumi pushes down his ego and tries not to squirm in his seat.

His mouth’s gone sandpapery but it feels like the air between them has grown thicker, a little easier to breathe in. Izumi makes a show of exhaling, chagrin tugging up at the corners of his mouth. “I don’t exactly have a choice, do I?”

Chiaki grins wide enough to make Izumi’s own cheeks hurt. “You always have a choice! But I think it’d do you some good-” his smile falters for a moment, only a split-second but it’s long enough for Izumi to remember the look, to have it stuck in his retinas even when his eyes are shut, “-to get out of this place. For a little while, at least.”

\\\\\

The Shatterdome basement is the twisting catacombs to its maze on the surface. All it requires is general high clearance key card access and a few ounces of courage to venture down into the depths, drafty overhang lamps casting pools like spotlights across the hundreds of shelves. Izumi wants to know why they don’t just digitize and save everyone the trouble.

It doesn’t take long for him to find Kanata’s file. A few hours into rifling through the Shatterdome’s archives leads him through the systematic chain of events. News articles, ranger reports, firsthand accounts, commander’s issuing statement of orders. He lays his jacket down against the grainy tile floor and spreads them out like a half built summoning circle, and starts to read.

Shinkai Kanata and Morisawa Chiaki were one of the most talented pairs of rangers to enter their Shatterdome as official pilots in the last ten years, a small part of an especially strong crop of recruits that graduated four years ago. He recognizes a few names sprinkled across multiple articles, Sakuma, Nito, and Itsuki among them. There’s more that he knows as names without a face to match, Hibiki and Sakasaki and Aoba. After the general niceties and fight debuts is where the narrative started to twist, leaving only half-truth speculative magazine clippings, blacked out papers with paragraph after paragraph of information now only inky lines.

Kanata had worked with the k-science department, a fact that Izumi could hardly remark as unusual when every article confirmed he was some kind of genius when it came to marine life. He had a passion for the sea in a way that was difficult for others to understand. Izumi could relate to the confusion. As far as he could tell though, the science department hardly got in the way of Kanata’s duties as a ranger – Crimson Tide’s kill record was impressive, especially for a mark-2.  

But his stack of documents is starting to run thin and with it the trail to the past grows narrower and narrower; whatever it was they wanted forgotten they had done a good job of making sure it was wiped clean off any and all official records. Izumi can feel himself falling further down the rabbit hole but his personality has hardly ever fallen short of  _ obsessive _ when it comes to getting what he wants. And right now he wants to know where Chiaki had learned to smile like that.

So he wanders, skims down the aisles for his therapist’s files, any tiny bit of information that could unravel the tangled ball of string a little further. He can’t be sure how much time has passed – it’s impossible to tell this deep underground, without so much as a passing glint of sunlight or artificial night to track the minutes by. There’s a littering of paper cuts along the tips of his fingers and a long-standing ache in his feet but eventually, he manages to churn things up, collecting bits and pieces in the otherwise useless dirt. Kanata, k-science, a pair of country kid’s ambitions turned worldly, a double event in the harbor of Hong Kong. If he was putting together a puzzle then all he had were edges, the beginnings but never the ends. A frame without a picture.

And it’s not until Izumi comes across two headlines, in particular, that the pieces begin to fit together.

**_“Crimson Tide Set for an Early Retirement”_ **

and,

**_“Can Humans Drift With Kaiju?: A Breakthrough in K-Science May Contain The Answers”_ **

Their release dates are only days apart, different stories given to separate news outlets to give the illusion of disconnection. The first is only a brief synopsis of the work  _ Crimson Tide _ had done during their time in the Shatterdome, coupled with a few direct quotes from Chiaki.  _ Only  _ Chiaki. The second sent a chill ravaging over his skin – about the kaiju hive mind, how we could use the capabilities of k-science drift technology to access their thoughts, and more importantly, their plans for attack. The team of scientists assigned to the task was listed only once, in the margin space of a photo caption. Kanata’s was one of the first to appear, second from the left, his closed mouth smile and sleepy eyes forever instilled in grainy black and white. Izumi doesn’t realize his hands are trembling until he files everything away again, the only evidence of his presence there in his invisible fingerprints left on the paper's edges.

So that’s what it was, then.

\\\\\

The wind is biting across the tarmac like some kind of wild animal, ripping into clothes like a wolf might a rabbit. Izumi retreats further down into his jacket, his fingernails already starting to turn blue, every inhale an effort not to let his teeth chatter. He’s always loved the aesthetic of cold water but the applied reality of it makes him want to curl up next to a fire until he sweats. Well, maybe not that long.

He spares a glance sideways for his new companions. It would all seem a bit too surreal if for the deep splintering ache in his toes as a reminder that this is all an unfortunate reality.

Sakuma Rei doesn’t look any different than the last time he saw him – on the stage of their old high school, pressed suit, dark hair slicked back and smile cold and sharp enough to prick your finger on. He’d since lost the hair style and the suit but his mouth was the same. A cruelly gentle thing served under bloody irises and dark lashes. It’s all very chillingly reminiscent of another, more familiar profile. Ritsu has his brother’s eyes too, it seems.

Hakaze Kaoru is a handsome guy; not Izumi’s type, but at times beauty is a very objective thing. He’s too much man and not enough boy, a strange amalgamation of someone who grew up too fast and didn’t grow up at all. It’s exhausting to keep up with and, frankly, Izumi doesn’t possess the stubbornness to bother. That’s what he tells himself, at least.

They’re waiting for a helicopter to take them north up the coast and while the air isn’t  _ uncomfortable  _ it isn’t exactly beneficial for their first meeting. They’d gotten the niceties out of the way, and the weather was too cold for anyone to speak without letting go of precious heat so they stayed silent, waiting. Izumi knows Rei flits his gaze to him furtively and he’s  _ cold  _ and it’s  _ annoying _ so ten minutes into their unspoken vow of silence he snaps.

“Kuma-kun is doing fine, by the way.” It doesn't sit quite right, evident in the way Kaoru raises an eyebrow in Rei’s direction, the infinitesimal twitch in Rei’s eyes, a well concealed visceral reaction to a simple two-syllable name. Izumi knows what that’s like. The clip of the helicopter through the clouds sounds distinctly in the distance, growing closer.

“You wanted to ask, didn’t you? I’m just saving us all the trouble.”

Rei’s smiling now, close-mouthed, tilting his head back as if in admiration. “I see Ritsu was right about you.”

Izumi  _ hmphs _ . “I’m not sure I want to know what you’re talking about.”

The smile shifting smirk that Rei wears belongs to Ritsu too, and Izumi decidedly does not think about how different things could’ve been, if they weren’t so bone-deep similar. It isn’t any of his business. He doesn’t care anyway, and when the helicopter lands and they take their seats he takes special precautions not to let a single point of contact between them indicate otherwise.

\\\\\

Rei explains the basics to him spread out on their two pushed together futons. Originally it was only one, but Kaoru had smiled at the inn owners till they melted in his hands and set out another for Izumi to have himself. It’s all they could spare, and glancing between Rei and Kaoru’s heads bent together and feet brushing Izumi’s all the more grateful for it.

Rei walks him through the logistics, their agenda, while Kaoru feeds him the lines necessary to match their given roles. The script is less of a set of rules than it is a rough guideline; smile, let your voice carry. Sell it. Keep your posture open, an invitation, don’t make eye contact with the ones in the front row for too long, it gets their hopes up. There’s always the ones that look straight through you, narrow their eyes and try to think they’re above you for not caring, for being the ones that’ll build your armor but never wear it. No, they can’t read your mind, no, they’re not cursing you to death in their heads. If they have questions then answer them as clearly as you can.

“They key is-” and Kaoru sits up a bit straighter for this one, “-to let them believe what they want about being a Ranger. It’s the only way to make sure their intentions are honest.”

Izumi brings his cup to his mouth but doesn’t drink from it. New places make him uneasy enough and the dinner they’d been provided was passable and all but his mind’s loops in logic didn’t always have to make sense. He peers at Kaoru over the cup’s lip. “What’s that even supposed to mean? Do you want me to lie?”

“What Kaoru-kun’s trying to say is, don’t give too much away.” Rei cuts in, without opening his eyes or moving from his laid out spot on the floor, meditation-like. “Every job has fine print. Ours isn’t any different.”

“Sakuma-san, you don’t have to make me look bad in front of our guest.”

“Oh? I wasn’t aware I was doing such a thing.”

“Your explanations are always more thorough than mine. Give me a break here it’s not like I’m not  _ trying _ -”

“Is that what you were doing? Well in that case I’m very proud.”

Kaoru rolls his eyes. Rei hasn’t moved since the exchange began.

Izumi sets his cup down, having given up on getting anything down until the next morning. He stretches, muscles trembling and joints cracking when he stands. “You two bicker like an old married couple. I’m going to take a bath.”

“ _ Huh? _ Wait, Senacchi?! What do you mean?!”

Rei sighs. “Are you really that unhappy in our marriage, Kaoru-kun?”

“Sakuma-san,  _ don’t–” _

Izumi slides the door shut behind him before he has to listen any longer.

\\\\\

They start small, hit the fishing villages first, the boondock towns where children can only dream of big hit heroics in their scratchy twin size beds. The boneyards, shanty two-story houses with no less than six families each – that’s where they begin. Izumi’s unsure if this is how the routine usually goes or if it’s some sick hazing ritual constructed by Eichi and Keito in secret. Chiaki certainly isn’t this sadistic. Probably.

The campaigns and recruitment processes are more complicated than he thought. Back when they’d applied together it was Leo that filled out all the forms – shocking when forms are probably, in fact, on the top of Tsukinaga Leo’s shitlist. Izumi didn’t remember the extensive release papers, the contracts, examinations of both the mental and physical kind. Everything leading up to the moment they’d stepped in  _ Lionheart  _ had been a blur of  _ hello’s _ and even more  _ goodbye’s _ , of Leo’s ginger hair flaring gold against the sun and Izumi’s frantic work to prevent breaking a nail. 

It’s funny now, to think of how important things can change so quickly. Sometimes at night he tosses with the weight of it, of dreams that are only half-nightmare. Leo’s there, holding a guitar or patting his cheek, or cutting the fringe of his hair in the bathroom mirror. Leo’s talking to him but all Izumi can hear are Tsukasa’s screams.

Rei and Kaoru are awake for it sometimes, the aftermath of Izumi’s cold sweat, shivering dreams, the ones where he chases clean breathes of outdoor air with four glasses of water and one more to splash against his face. Neither of them ask questions – he has a feeling that they already know. News can travel fast if Eichi allows it, maybe even adds his own fuel to the gossip fire to make it burn faster. The official announcement to the public had been that  _ Lionheart  _ was on temporary leave for structural repair, but that doesn’t mean the people on the inside believed it. Kaoru and Rei’s knowing silence spoke for itself.

They weave their way slowly in and out of the east coast’s lower edge, from universities and high schools to a few town halls.  _ It’s easier to recruit the ones who’ve suffered directly _ , Kaoru says to him one day, backstage at a small high school’s auditorium. It’s their third one that day and the drag of it’s starting to force all their shoulders down more than usual. Rei nudges Kaoru with his elbow and serves a look under his lashes,  _ not here, not now. _

Observing them enough it’s easy to see the low tension hung in their gazes, how Rei’s eyes linger on Kaoru’s artfully tipped spine when he walks away. How Kaoru chews on his lower lip, always, when Rei fires friendly retorts in their daily battle of wits. Izumi’s determined to keep a distance from them but he’s not _ blind _ . Instead of those starry-eyed front row kids he keeps his eyes on the pair beside him, wondering if they’re both too cagey to talk about it themselves.

Either way, Izumi figures, it isn’t any of his business anyway.

\\\\\

“Do you wanna know what I think?” Kaoru shucks a cigarette from the pack and twirls it between his fingers, idle. Izumi searches for a lighter but finds his hands otherwise empty.

The words are familiar and his skin tingles,  _ do you want my honest opinion, sena-kun? _

He looks pointedly at the balcony railing. “Not particularly, actually.”

Kaoru laughs, “At least you’re honest, I guess. But it’s too bad because I’m going to tell you anyway.”

The city rolls sleeplessly around them and Izumi feels like he’s seventeen again, on the edge of some great insanity that buzzes inside him like a second skin. He traces a finger over the human shaped emptiness inside him and suddenly it doesn’t really matter what Hakaze Kaoru, resident casanova and non-smoking smoker has to say.

He glances over all the same, watches the pale cigarette tint blue with the downtown nightlights when Kaoru says, “I think you were doomed from the start, Senacchi. You and your little hometown friends.” He stops, all wry, pitying smile and  _ knowing _ . Izumi feels his lip curl, an automatic defense mechanism set into place by years of building walls.

“You don’t know anything about us.”

“I know that all of you care too much.” Kaoru’s smile goes sadder, more crooked. “About this. About the war. About each other.”

Izumi tries to bite it back but his own grin only grows nastier, “Why the hell do you even care?”

“It’s cute, really. Inspiring, even.”

“Yeah, cute as all the girls I know you pick up every night.”

Kaoru’s smirk widens, “I knew you had a mouth on you somewhere.”

Izumi clamps one hand over the other and digs blunt nails into the baby flesh of his palm, painfully aware and growling. "You think you’re so clever, don’t you,  _ Kao-kun. _ "

Watching Kaoru choke on air is much more satisfying than he thought it would be.

"How else was I supposed to get you to talk to me?" 

“I thought you weren’t interested in men.”

“I’m not,” Kaoru shifts and digs in his pockets. Izumi scoffs, a little disbelieving they’re having this conversation at all.

There's a flick, the scrapping of wick to flame when Kaoru shields the lighter with his half-opened fist, somehow newly procured while Izumi wasn't watching close enough. But Kaoru doesn't bring it to his lips, wrist rolling over and extending near Izumi's clenching, interlocked hands.

“I don’t smoke– ” he starts, and Kaoru is pressing the rest of the almost full box against Izumi’s arm now, firm. An offering.

"It’s an olive branch," he explains, and Izumi swallows down his retort along with acrid smoke. "Better hurry before it burns out."

\\\\\

“Do you think he really does it?” Izumi asks one night, the last one of their never ending road trip before another helicopter came to take them home. It’s their first larger city in weeks, with an actual downtown and streets wider than a single winding lane. Kaoru had waved them all away as soon as they checked in, disappearing down the street like a paper thin cut out.

Rei lays back against the bed’s short headboard, kicks up his socked feet and unfolds the newspaper on his lap. They’d made a special trip for it to the convenience store around the corner before settling in. Izumi’s stretching out on his side, head propped in his hand. It’s not exactly his business, he keeps telling himself, but he’s nosy by nature; a likely side effect of growing up with Arashi. Besides this was something different, in his own self-interests more than anything else.

“Who can say,” Rei finally sighs and flips a page, Izumi’s comment not enough to stop his scanning of the home and garden section. “I do have my doubts, though.”

He waits for more and nothing comes, but the minute crinkle of a tightening grip on newspaper is hard to miss when Izumi’s spent his life calculating details, recording reactions.

“I’m not an idiot.”

“I did not presume that to be the case, Sena-kun.”

Izumi glares for a second longer before rolling over onto his back, resting his hands against his stomach. The bed swallows him up, sinking more and more with each passing minute. He let his eyes fall shut and tries to will away the watery feeling that makes his head spin.

“Kaoru-kun may seem simple-minded but the inner workings of his mind are quite complex.” Rei flips another page, the crisp noise of day old newsprint folded over. “Believe me, I live there too.”

He’s not sure why he opens his mouth again, because Sena Izumi really should be the last authority in how to handle anything filed under the word  _ emotions _ , but ripping a page from Ritsu’s book can’t be so bad every once and awhile.

“It doesn’t have to be complicated, does it?”

“How  _ I  _ feel is not. He’s a different story, I’m afraid.”

If Izumi had the energy to roll his eyes he’d make sure Rei could see his aggravation. Sometimes there’s no guiding the sheep that wants to be eaten. “That’s everybody’s excuse, Sakuma.”

“Not for that Leo-kun of yours.”

Izumi winces. Should’ve known better. “Ou-sama is an outlier and should not be counted.”

“Ah,” Rei trails off. “Is that so.”

The comforter is itchy against Izumi’s bare arms when he turns over again, away from Rei’s gaze and towards the room’s full length window, towards Kaoru, somewhere out in the city recesses, his skin dappling pale against the streetlamps. A lone cigarette lighter flipping between his fingers.

\\\\\

Tsukasa had woken up while Izumi was gone. The hospital’s the first place he goes, and he lets himself run this time, even if there’s no rush. His clothes are over a day old and he feels like he’d been in a low tumble drier all day but it’s worth it when Tsukasa cries, weakly and hidden against his dress shirt. It was one thing he hadn’t realized he was missing until then.

“You’re getting snot all over the one nice shirt I have left, Kasa-kun,” It’s supposed to have bite to it but he can’t muster the strength. Tsukasa just sniffles and mumbles something unintelligible, his grip fragile but tightening all the same. Izumi eventually lets his hand fall to the crown of his head, hair soft and freshly washed, gleaming.

He almost can’t say it. Maybe hospital air robs him of words that otherwise come easily.

“Welcome back, brat.”

Arashi and Ritsu are already there, had been since they slowed Tsukasa’s IV drip and allowed him to return to the world of the living. Arashi doesn’t seem to have let go of Tsukasa’s hand all the while, the reassuring grip something to keep him anchored to the bed. Ritsu sits up and stretches, gaze sharper than Izumi’s seen it since he left, more awake than he’s seen it since their whole ordeal began.

“ _ Welcome home, Secchan,”  _ Ritsu mouths, silent and smirking.

Tsukasa pulls himself away once his tears ebb, accepting Izumi’s offering of a tissue box from the bedside table. “Where’s Leader?”

Ah. There it is.

The room goes stale with it in seconds, with the anticipation of responsibility. It snaps against him like a tuning rode, a dull and hollow sound. Arashi’s looking at him expectantly and he wishes there was a mirror, to see his own expression when put face to face with it. What would he look like now that the ink is faded and gone?

“He…He’s–” Izumi searches for a word only to realize one might not exist, “gone. He’s gone.”

Tsukasa blinks, expression blank until it morphs into something much more dramatic, almost on the verge of a scream.

“Don’t – don’t look at me like that. He’s not dead.” He hadn’t calculated for that misinterpretation but it’s one he should’ve expected. Might’ve if he was more than a wandering, incomplete half. Maybe if things were different. “He’s just, gone. Disappeared. He left and we don’t know where he is.”

They don’t look at each other, Tsukasa twisting sheets between his weak fingers, Izumi watching out the window where he thinks the ocean might lie, too tired to add his usual disdain.

“Isn’t that worse, then?”

The words stab some hidden soft spot, drags them all down beneath the surf. Ritsu’s eyeing him, not having missed a thing, and Arashi’s gone back to stroking Tsukasa’s hand, slower and impossibly more soothing than before.

_ what am i supposed to say to that? _

The knife wound crawls through him at a snail’s pace, dull agony when he tries to swallow only to end up afraid of breaking the silence. It breaks into him, slow, a realization he’d been putting off in the corner of his mind. This is who they are now. A ripped and stained excuse of a flag for the tapestry they once were. Stains that won't wash out can only fade with the passage of time, cruel scars against a once spotless coat of armor. They will never be those kids again, adventuring through Leo’s backyard and fighting demons made of fallen branches.

_ what am i supposed to tell him, leo? _

There must still be some deity on his side because in that moment the door behind him clicks, quiet, as if afraid of being noticed. Everyone perks up at the noise, grateful for distraction no matter how brief. Nazuna’s head pokes through the crack in the door and his eyes widen.

“O-Oh I, didn’t know you all would be here…” His voice dies off, gaze flicking between everyone in the room and finally settling on Izumi out of habit and familiarity. “We can come back later?”

Izumi’s about to interrogate where the  _ we  _ is coming from but Tsukasa’s voice, unsure and trembling in his throat, makes him hold his tongue. Tsukasa’s leaning forward, as much as his body lets him and he swallows, hesitant. A warm and primal ball of hurt that sticks in his teeth before he’s able to try again. It crumbles and breaks a few times but when he finally gets it out a cold sweat spreads over Izumi’s palms.

“Hajime-kun?”

He wonders if they’re all holding the same collective breath, if they’re all glued to the same spot in the doorway where Nazuna’s twisting his neck to look behind him, eyes a different shade of gentle than with anybody else. A few seconds pass, or maybe a few minutes; time holds more weight in moments like these – when everyone in the room forgets to blink.

The first thing Izumi notices are the eyes, peeking around the frame, doe-eyed blooming lavender fields over deep valleys of dark circles. From Tsukasa’s bedside he can see his shaking jaw, as if caught in a cold rain for a few hours too long. Izumi hadn’t paid much attention to Hajime Shino in the past but something tangible has changed, altered and tailored from the inside out.

“Tsukasa-kun-” There’s a choke, and Izumi doesn’t notice Tsukasa’s half out of bed already before the door busts open, his heart monitor tapping out a marching beat tempo. Hajime’s still in ward clothes, soft stitched shirt and pants that seem to cling to whatever frame he has left. He nearly trips and Tsukasa and Nazuna go to dive down in tandem before he recovers, half stumbling, half running until he could bury his puffy face against Tsukasa’s neck. It all happens so fast Izumi doesn’t realize he’s backed up against the wall until it’s over.

Hajime’s crying is different from Tsukasa’s – full, bursting, noisy even when muffled by the fabric of Tsukasa’s hospital gown. Tsukasa’s tears seem silent in comparison, hiccupping and soft into the soft of Hajime’s hair. They cling to each other with a need that engulfs them all, too close, too intimately raw. Izumi stares at his shoes. He can hear someone else sniffling, Arashi or Nazuna, or both. The dull ache in his chest sharpens and spreads like a widening crack across the patched up parts of his heart. A remolded piece of clay left to sit in the kiln for a day too long.  

_ you should be here _

He punches in each word with bloody, tired knuckles. He swallows down his heart and the drift swallows his words, and listening to Hajime and Tsukasa’s quiet sobs overlap is when Izumi realizes that it isn’t over. That it never will be.

\\\\\

“You knew about Morisawa, didn’t you?”

“Izumi-chan, half of the  _ Shatterdome knows _ -“

He suddenly feels broken loose, like a slingshot with no trajectory. “You just can’t help yourself, can you?”

Arashi, shifts, crosses her ankles, “I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean.”

She’s leaning against the hospital’s smoking patio railing on her elbows, wind whipping to tug at her sweater, an old takeaway from a photoshoot they did years ago. It’ll truly be winter soon and the cold’s only creeping up on them stronger every day. He thumbs at the almost full pack of cigarettes in his pants pocket but doesn’t take them out. He doesn’t have a lighter anyway.

“It means whatever’s going on in my head is none of your business.”

They’d left Tsukasa, Hajime and Nazuna to be alone, to give all of them some breathing room. Ritsu had strolled the opposite direction down the hall and when Izumi called for him all he got was a  _ maa-kun’s waiting for me, go on ahead _ . Arashi had managed to cornered him out here eventually, the initial relief and charm of seeing each other alive beginning to wear off.

He studies her, doing more glaring than anything else. What he doesn’t expect is the pout that forms on her lips, a familiar part of their school days but something that feels out of place here, in a battleground of metal and water and sand.

“You’ve always been terrible at accepting my help,” and her voice is genuine enough to make his hubris shrink a little. “I guess some things really do never change.”

Izumi scoffs, falling to let the railing notch against his spine and  _ god  _ it’s nice to have someone to rip into again without the pretense of politics or politeness. Arashi’s always handled his self-destructive episodes the best, for whatever reason. Probably because she’s closest to the things that drive him to the edge, make his ticking time bomb countdown jump to a 3-second warning before blowing the rational thinking from his brain.

“You have to tell Tsukasa-chan the truth.” It’s so soft, so low he almost doesn’t catch it against the chilly air.

It should make his blood boil but that breeze coming in off the ocean’s killing any motivation he has to get angry. There’s a hollowed out place where his anguish should be. He blames it on the jet-lag. “Naru-kun,  _ I  _ don’t even know what the truth is–”

“The one who really owes him an explanation is Ou-sama, but you’re the next best thing we have so it’ll have to do.”

Izumi tilts his head up only to be met with a wall of gray. A hundred different answers come to mind but he goes for the one with the least amount of blowback.

“I just lived in his head for a while, I don’t see why that qualifies me for anything.”

“I think you'd rip your heart out and present it to him on a silver platter, if he asked.”

“That's disgusting, and also impossible.”

Arashi’s silver bell laughter only ticks away at his irritation. She goes quiet and Izumi finds himself waiting with baited breath, waiting on the next onslaught he’ll no doubt have to defend against.

“How long has it been?”

“… _ Fuck off. _ ”

“Don’t think so,” Arashi looks down, almost apologetic. “What would you do without me?”

Izumi hates it. He hates her. He hates the way she makes him itch in places he wouldn’t dare to scratch, parts of himself he doesn’t want to touch.

_ How long has it been? _

His dreams are a graveyard landscape accented in a single spot of color; of red and green and faint freckles on pale skin, fireworks when he breathes and crushing white lilies in the flat of his palm.

_ How long have you been in love with Tsukinaga Leo? _

\\\\\

Keito is reviewing the latest casualty reports when he finally gives him the news.

“You’re being given time off, Sena. We found him.”

His brain doesn’t quite process it at first, watching idiotically as Keito stamps a seal over a manila letter envelope and passes it onto the tower already waiting in Yuzuru’s arms.

“What?”

The sigh of exasperation pierces straight into his lungs. “Go home, Ranger.” Another sigh, this time not as scathing, “You have two weeks.”

Izumi had been afraid of that.

\\\\\

_ You have two weeks:  _ it’s double-speak, same as the two-sided weapon in Lionheart’s closed fist, blade and bow. The echo in his head makes it throb behind his eyes, a tension headache that promises to pile on until it’s killer.

He stalks around on his last night in the Shatterdome before heading back to his room,  _ their  _ room, slamming the door until it reverberates down his spine. The tension pools tight in his stomach, a thick rubber band that threatens to snap back without warning.

_ You have two weeks to bring your co-pilot back _ .

He drags a hand through his hair, crushes the two hot tears that threaten to fall, and starts packing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so i know this has been 3 months coming but it's almost 14k so i hope you can forgive me. 
> 
> i honestly have no earthly idea when the next part is going to be out, but school goes on break soon so hopefully in the not Too Extremely Distant future.


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